First, the runners up:
Da Lench Mob- Guerillas In Tha Mist: For someone entering a rap phase and in love with Ice Cube, this album is perfect. They all sound like him (one of them EXACTLY), the production is mean and relentless, and most of all, catchy. Plus, look at how badass these guys are!
Pantera- A Vulgar Display Of Power: "Mouth For War," "A New Level," and "Fucking Hostile" all rule- super heavy and angry with a southern feel and solos. The rest of the album doesn't hold up of course, but it starts out strong, and featured one of their best songs, "This Love-" a perfectly unnatural mix of balladry and metal.
Tori Amos- Little Earthquakes: From Pantera to Tori Amos... I love my musical taste. There are some fruity parts on this, where she get a bit too indulgent and weird (and without any other instruments to help the songs, it doesn't work), but this also features some of her strongest work. "Silent All These Years," "Winter" and "China" are gorgeous.
Sublime- 40 Oz. To Freedom: "Date Rape," "Badfish," and "Smoke Two Joints" are the hits, but the rest of the album is solid as a whole- I originally felt it was boring after hearing their vastly superior self-titled album years later, but this has held up as a solid mix of reggae, punk, ska, and fun.
Ugly Kid Joe- America's Least Wanted: A gimmicky band that ruled MTV and my 6th grade heart shouldn't have lasting value. But this somehow does. "Goddamn Devil," "So Damn Cool" "Everything About You" and their cover of "Cats In The Cradle" still hold up as great rock music, whether gimmicky or not.
10. Polvo- Cor-Crane Secret
Other than maybe Sonic Youth, there really aren't any bands who sound like Polvo. I got this for my birthday in the same summer I was listening to The Mighty Mighty Bosstones and No Doubt, and that couldn't be a weirder combination of music. This sounds like a bunch of people who built their own guitars and amps, tuned their guitars to the weirdest tunings possible, and invented their own way of playing, with the goal of creating the weirdest sounding songs they could. Everything is dissonant and weird, and harmonies don't make sense (but somehow do). The vocals aren't the best, but they tie the oddities into actual songs, and somehow it all works into their own sound. This is probably their best album- it's creepy sounding at times, sometimes melodic, and mostly weird- especially when you consider it came out the same year that Ugly Kid Joe were popular.
Best songs: "Vibracobra," "Kalgon," "Bend Or Break," "Sense Of It," "Ox Scapula."
9. Nirvana- Incesticide
I didn't know until years after initially hearing this that it is an album of b-sides, which explains the unevenness of it all- that it could contain what I feel is one of Nirvana's greatest songs ("Aneurysm") as well as some of their worst ("Hairspray Queen"). Either that, or I didn't understand what b-sides were at the time. But it was Nirvana, and anything Nirvana was good at the time, and based on that and the reminiscent feel I get from hearing this, it stands the test of time. I also just found out that "Son Of A Gun" and "Turnaround" were covers, and "Molly's Lips"- one of the best songs on this- wasn't written by Nirvana. This is a great b-side collection though, and the unevenness and random feel of it makes it an intriguing listen. Every song is different enough, yet still is 100% Nirvana. And "Aneurysm..." oh "Aneurysm." Why were you never on an official album? You're sooo good. And you end with the longest collection of feedback noise I've heard.
Best songs: "Dive," "Sliver," "Stain," "Been A Son," "Molly's Lips," "(New Wave) Polly," "Aneurysm."
8. Green Day- Kerplunk
Obviously, I first heard Green Day with 1994's "Dookie." Later, I was on a weird kick of owning a record player and for some reason bought this on vinyl. I remember playing super nintendo while playing this over and over again. It's poorly produced, Billie Joe still has a young snarly voice, the drum beats are pretty boring, but this album is full of what Green Day always did best- write simple, catchy, great rock songs. They hadn't hit their stride yet, and that's obvious with some of the throwaway tracks at the end, but "2000 Light Years Away" and "Christie Road" are as good as anything on "Dookie." And "Dominated Love Slave" is a fantastically stupid song that usually sticks in my head better than any of the real songs on here.
Best songs: "2000 Light Years Away," "One For The Razorbacks," "Welcome To Paradise," "Christie Road," "Private Ale."
7. Ice Cube- The Predator
As with most of these older releases, I heard this after I heard the superior "Lethal Injection," but this one blew me away when I found the used tape at Bull Moose for $3.97. I have yet to hear a rap album with a better introduction and opening track. It's funky, sample heavy, and mean as hell. Once Ice Cube shows up and starts rapping, he's furious and violent and you know you're in for something serious . It's a perfect opening track, and it's only just the beginning. There are some major duds on here, but "Wicked" and "We Had To Tear This Motherfucker Up" maintain the mean badassery of Ice Cube, while the rest of the good songs are funky and more laid back. The biggest fault with this album is that he put out a remixed version of "Check Yo Self" with Das EFX AFTER this came out, and the original version is not very good. Oh well, I edit my albums in itunes, and boom- problem fixed. This album is awesome in general and still remains one of the better gangsta rap albums in existence. Oh, and it also has one of the most undeniably classic rap songs ever: "It Was A Good Day:" a rare moment of positivity and humor on an otherwise fairly brutal album.
Best songs: "When Will They Shoot," "Wicked," "The Predator," "Check Yo Self," "It Was A Good Day," "We Had To Tear This Motherfucker Up."
6. Faith No More- Angel Dust
After my straight-up worship of their first album (well, second, but I don't consider Faith No More complete without Mike Patton), no album would be able to match up- and certainly not one as weird and all over the place as this. This is the album where Faith No More started experimenting a lot more. Patton showed his true voice and the many capabilities he has vocally, the band played metal, funk and soul in weirder ways, used cheerleader cheers (I HATE that song ("Be Agressive")), and threw some curveballs at us- I have no idea what genre "RV" or "Midnight Cowboy" fall into. A lot of this has to do with intense drug usage, but most was because Mike Patton was now part of the songwriting (which he wasn't before), and it truly showed a band finding their sound and strengths. "Midlife Crisis" was huge and deserved to be. "A Small Victory" followed. I wasn't in love with this at first, and it's still only my third favorite FNM album, but it is still fantastic, and just like "The Real Thing," light years ahead of mostly everything that came out in 1992.
Best songs: "Land Of Sunshine," "Midlife Crisis," "Smaller And Smaller," "Everything's Ruined," "A Small Victory," "Crack Hitler."
5. Ministry- Psalm 69
I remember seeing the videos for "N.W.O." and "Just One Fix" on MTV's 120 Minutes. They were a mess of news footage, creepy video cut throughout, and singer Al Jourgensen walking down the street, huge black hair and cowboy hat, being tough and scary. I found the music to be terrifying and flooring- industrial sounds, an unrelenting beat and riffage that crept into your head and didn't leave. The songs didn't change much- their heaviness and fury were based around staying in your head and slowly building to something more. This album was one of my first CDs, and it was all I ever could have wanted: no words on the cover, creepy multi-layered art, and dark, dark, dark. I felt cool to have something so dark and heavy. At the time, I didn't love all the noise (songs like "TV II" and "Grace" were experimental collages of noise and sound effects I was too young and ignorant to appreciate at the time), and I always thought "Jesus Built My Hotrod," although awesome, distracted from the bleakness of the album, but over time, I've grown to love every second of this album. And when the vocals kick in in "Psalm 69" after 2 minutes of choir singing, with screams of "drinking the blood of Jesus," it still kind of scares me. This album rules, and nothing Ministry would do afterward- nor what most industrial bands created after- would come close to it.
Best songs: "N.W.O.," "Just One Fix," "Jesus Built My Hotrod," "Scare Crow," "Psalm 69."
4. Stone Temple Pilots- Core
Ministry had a better album as a whole, but the strength of the hits on Stone Temple Pilots' debut album pushed it ahead. These guys were enormous this year. They rode the coattails of Nirvana and Pearl Jam in being the next grunge band to come out, but they did it heavier and more fiercely than we had heard yet. The riff to "Sex Type Thing" is still one of the most mean riffs I've ever heard. Driving riffs, simple and powerful beats, and Scott Weiland's gruff and only-deep-on-this-album vocals (did his voice change or was he faking it on this?) create hit after hit on, in my opinion, their second best album (I think "Purple" was stronger). And in the middle of it all? Their first hint at how solid of songwriters they were with the immensely popular slow jam, "Creep." Remember when they played MTV Unplugged and he sang from a rocking chair? Yea, that was awesome. So is this album. Unfortunately, since it was thrown into the "grunge movement," it may be remembered as "just another grunge album," but it deserves more credit than that. This is just great rock music, plain and simple.
Best songs: "Dead And Bloated," "Sex Type Thing," "Wicked Garden," "Creep," "Plush," "Crackerman."
3. Dr. Dre- The Chronic
It feels a little odd to have an extremely profane rap album at number 3 on a list of music that has hit me emotionally or meant something to me that transcended music itself, but this album is undeniably awesome, and I would argue that it's the best rap album ever made. This album dominated MTV and my morning drives to school (the guy who drove me loooved rap). Everyone knew Snoop Dogg's verse in "Nuthin' But A 'G' Thang," and everyone had watched the videos MTV played all day a thousand times each. What makes this album rule is 1, that it still sounds fantastic and relevant today, and 2, it's incredibly consistent- this is one of the few rap albums where even the skits are entertaining. Listening to this from start to finish is an experience in Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Korupt, and everyone else's lives in Compton. Dre pioneered a west coast sound that he would continue to use and refine over his next refuse-to-put-out-more-than-1-album-a-decade 20 years: the wirey shifting synthesizers mixed with simple beats and Parliament samples, used in either dark and intense gangsa rap or laid back and funky jams. And not only that, people forget that before he gave the world Eminem, he gave us Snoop Dogg on this. A classic, for sure.
Best songs: "Fuck Wit Dre Day (And Everybody's Celebratin')," "Let Me Ride," "The Day The Niggaz Took Over," "Nuthin' But A 'G' Thang," "Lil' Ghetto Boy," "Bitches Ain't Shit."
2. Alice In Chains- Dirt
I remember getting this tape on the way home from school at Zayre's, during their going-out-of-business-sale. I had heard "Would?" and was intrigued, and it was cheap- why not? I sat on the edge of the couch in the living room while it snowed relentlessly outside (we may have had a half day from school because of the snow) and I pressed play. I remember being pretty much instantly floored. This was dark, evil stuff with some of the weirdest vocal melodies I'd ever heard and some of the darkest lyrics I'd ever read. They took the dark, minor bluesy riffs that Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath started and took them to a whole new level. Often the choruses kicked in with more major chords with an almost uplifting feel, but it always went back to dark, dark, dark. Listening to this now and reading that most of Layne Staley's lyrics were about the turmoil that heroin addiction was putting him through, coupled with the incredibly sad story of him slowly dying alone in his apartment (read his wiki page- it's horrible) makes this an even darker listen. But no sadness, just rock. This band created something special with this album, that sadly, they would never come close to again. This album is perfect- it's heavy and rocks throughout, but the incredible vocals of Staley and the unique melodies he and Jerry Cantrell sing throughout the album make it not just unique and awesome, but one of the bleakest, darkest and most ageless classics I own- even now, I still feel the power I first felt on that snowy day.
Best songs: "Them Bones," "Dam That River," "Down In A Hole," "Rooster," "Dirt," "Hate To Feel," "Angry Chair," "Would?"
1. Rage Against The Machine- Self Titled
When I looked at what came out in 1992, I said "oh, simple, Alice in Chains- nothing will beat that" until of course, I got to this. This album was the first album I heard where a group so seamlessly combined rap and rock music, and it remains the best representation of the band who always did it best (sorry Limp Bizkit).
This was also probably the first time I experienced a "grower" of an album- the first time I heard Rage Against The Machine was seeing their video for "Freedom," and thinking it was bad- the verses were solid, but the screaming at the end was terrible. A few friends liked them, but I didn't see the hype. I later would hear The Crow Soundtrack, which included their song, "Darkness," which I instantly liked. After listening more and more, I decided to give this a chance and bought the tape in the mall one day. The cover of a monk on fire scared me, and their rap/metal sound for some reason made me uneasy- I was honestly worried that I had just bought something I wasn't ready for. I was like an old parent, confused at how a band could do what they were doing.
But for someone who instantly loved a band as odd as Faith No More, and who liked heavy music and rap equally, I don't know what I was thinking. This album was instantly incredible to me. I soon learned to appreciate his disgusting screaming- this was pure emotion and anger that I hadn't truly heard yet. I had never heard a band that cared so much about the things they care about. I had never heard a band stand for something and still rock so well. The sounds Tom Morello created with his guitar still impress me, and considering he was doing this stuff this long ago is pretty impressive.
Zack de la Rocha was clearly a solid lyricist, but I was more into just how pleasing his voice was to my ears when he rapped or rarely sang- and at the same time, how painful yet awesome it was when he screamed. Hearing someone not screaming cleanly- someone really losing it and screaming with a pure, real anger like this was ugly and incredible. In hindsight, it's pretty clear to see where my movement into nu-metal and then later hardcore/metalcore, etc. started. It was largely started with this album. There's mosh-able parts, super head-bangy parts, parts to scream along with, parts to rap along with and groove- it has everything, and it's a relentless album. It doesn't let up. "Bombtrack" (which, no lie, I used as a warm up song for my JV basketball team- yes, we came running out to this song) is a perfect opener, "Killing In The Name" is the perfect scream- anger anthem, "Bullet In The Head" is a song that only gets better as it goes along (I used to always imagine it being used for a car chase scene in a movie, and the car would explode through a building and launch into mid-air when the song kicks in), "Wake Up" (which was used in The Matrix) was a perfect mix of minor, evil sounding riffing mixed with funk, "Fistful of Steel" has one of the most badass riffs I've ever heard, and "Freedom" was the perfect closer, which also had an ending feedback freakout rivaling Nirvana's "Aneurysm."
Without Tom Morello or Zack de la Rocha, this band would have sucked. RATM was the perfect combination of a fantastic frontman and an even more fantastic songwriter- someone who could play neat sounds for rap music but wrote instantly memorable and rocking riffs better than anyone at the time. For 3 albums, he didn't miss- every riff was awesome. But this was the best, and it's no wonder that this remains the best combination of rap and rock ever, and still sounds incredible today. Please come back guys. Audioslave was really bad, and Zack, all your little projects are neat, but they're kind of boring. Come back Rage. America misses you.
Best songs: "Bombtrack," "Killing In The Name," "Bullet In The Head," "Wake Up," "Fistful Of Steel," "Township Rebellion," "Freedom."
