I recently found that I had run out of years I hadn't covered already that didn't feel too recent to revisit, which was probably a natural consequence of allowing myself to "throw one back" into the bag if I didn't like the result the first time - but rather than give up the project entirely, I decided to start over again but revamp how I did things a bit - rather than just go for a massive quantity of albums, I'll start being a little more selective, hitting maybe a few releases a week, and writing reviews. Thus, late December 2025 until late January 2025, I took another look at 1991:
Nirvana - Nevermind
A while ago, I saw a post in a 90s alternative rock group asking where you were when you first heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit” - hilariously, I realized my answer would be “watching some pre-teen targeted music video countdown show on Nickelodeon at 10 or 11 years old, being annoyed and confused by it, and waiting for ‘I Can’t Dance’ by Genesis to come on”. It’d be another few years before I came around to the genre - other than a They Might Be Giants tape given to me by my half-sister, if they count.
There’s not a lot about this album I could say that you haven’t heard already, but I do want to point out how I’ve come to appreciate how well sequenced it is - I feel like every song is placed exactly where it needed to be in terms of pacing. I first experienced it on cassette, where both sides started on a fast song and ended on a slow acoustic one - Side A starting with Teen Spirit and ending with “Polly”, B starting with “Territorial Pissings” and ending with “Something in The Way” *. Even if you’re streaming or listening to a CD, that sequence ends up working pretty well - “Polly” ends up being a bridge between “Lithium”, one of the poppiest songs on the album, and “Territorial Pissings”, one of the most “punk” ones… And it even sort of fits their sense of humor to have a solemn acoustic song about assault immediately followed by Krist Novoselic screeching lyrics from The Youngbloods’ optimistic 60s folk-rock anthem “Get Together”.
*(Not counting hidden track “Endless Nameless”, which my cassette didn’t even have)
Melvins - Eggnog
I figured if I was going to listen to one thing on my shortlist on Christmas it’d be this, because of the title, the gift-wrap motif of the packaging, and the fact that it’s the shortest one at 20 minutes. Not that this actually is the Melvins’ Christmas album or anything - about the only thing that could even be connected to the holiday at a stretch would be the nonsensically cut up Christian sermon excerpts in “Hogleg”.
I would hazard a guess that these were four songs recorded during the same sessions as the Bullhead album (which I’ll get to later), but left off so the release would fit more neatly on one LP - the same producer is credited, and it’s the same drum-heavy mix of punk, heavy metal and noise.
Since there’s just four songs, I might as well describe them all: “Wispy” isn’t terribly wispy, but might have gotten its title because it’s kind of a barebones deconstruction of a typical Melvins song - the lead guitar disappears after 30 seconds, leaving just bass, drums and vocals, and deliberately giving the oddly empty feeling of a guitar-based song where someone accidentally erased most of the guitars.. “Antioxidote” is the most accessible track on the album, with a fairly conventional hardcore punk-ish song structure, a moshable chugging guitar riff, and a breakdown that would almost have a “chant along” quality if you could actually tell what Buzz Osborne was saying (my first guess was “big dumb Lenny!” - maybe it’s about Of Mice and Men?). Other than the preacher samples, “Hogleg” is notable for being sampled by Beck for a noise break in his single “Beer Can” and for unusually high, almost Paul Stanley-like vocals from Buzz. Finally “Charmicarmicat” repeats and gradually builds on a queasy sounding chord progression at a very slow tempo for 13 minutes, to an effect that’s a bit punishing but ultimately kind of hypnotic if you stick with it.
They Might Be Giants - Miscellaneous T
This release consists of b-sides and remixes from 1987 to 1989, but I’m counting it for 1991 because none of the material had appeared on an LP previously. Other than the remixes, it really does almost play like a “lost” eighties album from the band, especially with how their early works mixed more purely experimental pieces in with their skewed but undeniably catchy pop songs. “Hey Mr. DJ”, “It’s Not My Birthday”, and perhaps especially “Nightgown of the Sullen Moon” are the hidden pop gems of the album, and to me it’s sort of baffling none of them were on proper albums - at least they’re compiled both here and on the later box set Then The Earlier Years. So far as the more experimental pieces go, highlights include “I’ll Sink Manhattan”, a jazzy torch ballad with a strangely sparse arrangement, the noisy and simplistic but catchy “Mr. Klaw”, and “For Science”, which plays like an out of context excerpt from a science fiction rock opera. I’d also like to bring up the new wave rock polka “The Famous Polka” for apparently being an early live favorite, and for its celebrity-worship-spoofing lyrics actually becoming more relevant in this age of “parasocial relationships”: Essentially the narrator of the song is collecting trivia about his favorite celeb as he desperately tries to prove any kind of connection with her (e.g. “the famous person wears the same size water skis as me / she’s got three cars, as many years I’ve lived in this city”)
Slint - Spiderland
At times I feel like this is a “you had to be there” kind of record, and I, well, wasn’t there. Its sound and dynamics have apparently gone on to influence a lot of guitar-based music since: not just other “post rock”, but filtering on down to post-grunge, and maybe even nu-metal (well a certain guitar lick in Nosferatu made me think of Korn of all things on this listen). It does sometimes have a certain power I can feel though. I started liking Breadcrumb Trail more once I paid attention to the lyrics and realized that, for all its dark and mysterious musical atmosphere, it’s just a slice of life tale of a man falling in love with the fortune teller at a seedy fair, with the loudest, most intense section being a description of their riding a rollercoaster together - I can picture it playing out as a short silent film. Actually most of the songs rely heavily on spoken-word, and it’s kind of one of the strengths, because it makes the songs come off as cryptic little short stories set to music. The one track that is primarily sung, “Washer”, is arguably let down a little by weak vocals, but on the other hand it could be seen as making the depressing content feel more grounded because it sounds like it’s coming from an ordinary person who’s planning on ending it all. Interestingly, the band themselves seemed to have agreed that the vocals were not always their strong suit - alongside credits and recording dates, the back cover of the album includes an address for “interested female vocalists” to write to.
Butthole Surfers - piouhgd
I was probably going to get to the Buttholes eventually, but honestly I just got to the Stranger Things episode where their 1987 track “Human Cannonball” gets some unexpected play - suffice it to say not everyone in the scene appreciates the song… but then again, the show has always used music as shorthand characterization, the characters have always been depicted having different tastes, and even at their most “normal” Butthole Surfers have never really been something for everyone.
This particular album was their tamest yet at the time: Don’t get me wrong, if they were trying to just make a normal rock record here, they still had a fairly out there idea of what “normal” was - it’s just that at their best, their eighties material could be goofy, frightening, and rocking all at once, but this one is mostly just goofy with a little bit of rocking.
A lot of the aforementioned “goofy” songs come off as jokes on the listener, but I actually enjoy the humor around half the time: “Revolution” comes off as a spoof of protest songs that are too vague to end up actually saying much of anything (even before it spends half its runtime on the band chanting “Gary Shandling!”). The overly repetitive country waltz of “Lonesome Bulldog” has Gibby Haynes narrating in a Kennedy-esque Boston accent for some reason, and not only does it get three reprises throughout the album, but “Lonesome Bulldog II” appears immediately after “Lonesome Bulldog” itself. The cover version of Donovan’s “Hurdy Gurdy Man” is both goofy and a little rocking: I believe I already made this comparison in my review of the Dumb and Dumber soundtrack, but they’ve exaggerated the mumbled, echoey vocals of the original to the point where they sound like Popeye is singing the song through a snorkel in an underwater cave... But on the other hand, Paul Leary seems to be trying to out-psychedelic the electric leads of the original, and may even succeed at it. And finally, “Something” is one where you have to be familiar with both the band’s own early work and that of The Jesus and Mary Chain - it sets the lyrics to the Buttholes 1982 unhinged noise rock rant “Something” to the tune of JAMC’s relatively more melodic 1985 noise pop song “Never Understand”.
Two of the more “rocking” songs are possibly of a piece with “Hurdy Gurdy Man” in that they come off as affectionately skewed tributes to “uncool” 60s and 70s influences: For all its noisy moments and pitchshifted deep vocals, “Blind Man” is basically a blues rock track, while “Golden Showers” feels like a nod to The Doors at their most circusy, albeit with the off-key, synthesized horn section seeming to spoof their more orchestrated Soft Parade era. Finally, the most psychedelic moment, and maybe the highlight, is the hypnotic 12 minute “PSY”, which stems from an instrumental live jam they’d been performing at live shows at least a year previous, but with added lyrics.
Ween - The Pod
Ween’s second album is maybe their first fully “brown” one. When I first heard that term in the Ween fan community, I parsed it in context as just “lo-fi and trippy”, but a youtube video essay I saw a while ago explained it a little differently: Essentially “brown” is where sincerity meets the limitations of no budget home recording - it should come off like the performer believes they have a great song they absolutely have to capture and share with the world in its purest form, despite having to struggle against things like poor recording fidelity, lack of multiple takes, and even to some extent their own musical abilities. So, “Dr. Rock” and “Sketches Of Winkle” sonically feel like two guys recording on a 4 track tape in a bedroom, but are written and performed like they’re destined to be played to thousands of screaming fans in a sports arena. Likewise, it might take a couple listens to realize “Sorry Charlie” has all the hallmarks of a great weepy country rock ballad ala “Dead Flowers” - it’s just that they didn’t have a backing band of seasoned country session musicians as they would on 12 Golden Country Greats, so at first it comes off as a mess of scratchy guitar, loping bass, and barely discernable vocals.
It’s come up a few times in my Butthole Surfers coverage that I’m usually tickled when a band takes one cliche of a rock subgenre and just spends a whole song subverting it as kind of a joke on the audience: For this reason I’ve got to single out opening track “Strap On That Jammy Pac” - you know how sometimes a blues-rock or rockabilly styled song will start out really stretching out its basic bluesy melody in order to build up to a faster, more rockin’ tempo? The central musical joke of “Jammy Pac” is that it starts out seeming like it’s about to do that, but actually stays at that pokey tempo the entire three minutes, then just ends. They do kinda offset the lack of payoff by immediately following up with “Dr. Rock”, making the song feel more like a long-ish intro to the album as a whole.
The production and 76 minute run-time prevent me from recommending it as the first Ween album you should experience unless you’re an aficionado of certain other lo-fi artists (say, Guided by Voices), But it’s so important to the should definitely at least be your second or third - the relatively more produced Chocolate and Cheese or The Mollusk might be more welcoming entry points otherwise.
Melvins - Bullhead
This might be my favorite Melvins album, though not necessarily the one you should check out first: Opening with the longest, slowest track, “Boris”, isn’t the most listener-friendly move - there’s a similar slow-build effect to “Charmicarmicat” off the Eggnog EP, though this time the riff is straightforward enough to slowly headbang to. The most accessible tracks, meanwhile, are right in the middle of the album - “It’s Shoved” includes an oddly catchy bass part that Nirvana would later borrow for “Milk It”, while “Zodiac” hearkens back to their days as a hardcore punk band. Elsewhere, everything is just slow and heavy enough, and if it makes sense, I guess this is one of my favorites because it’s just the most “Melvins” sounding Melvins album to me.
REM - Out Of Time
For some reason I’ve started to develop an association between this album, Talking Heads’ Little Creatures, and maybe even B52s Cosmic Thing - I don’t know, “fringe” bands trying for something glossy and poppy, but thankfully not losing much of their idiosyncrasy in the process*? The two hits you’re likely to encounter on radio (or at least in the grocery store) are the obsessive torch song “Losing My Religion” and the misleadingly cheerful “Shiny Happy People” - the 70s-era Beach Boys-influenced “Near Wild Heaven” was also one of the singles and sounds like it should have been a bigger hit to my ears (maybe people who heard it on the radio didn’t recognize it as being by the same band as the other two I mentioned, since its one a few songs where MIke Mills took on lead vocals). Like their previous major label album Green, this has its share of more atmospheric ballads alongside the poppy stuff, but these work a little better for me than the ones on that album - other highlights are the gorgeously hopeless “Country Feedback” and “Texarkana”, which is actually the closest this album gets to a “rocker” but is still moody and orchestrated enough that I’m putting it in this category.
*Further loose connections: Little Creatures had art by Howard Finster like REM’s Reckoning did, and of course B52’s Kate Pierson appears on backing vocals on three songs
Ned’s Atomic Dustbin - God Fodder
I initially set out to cover Jesus Jones’ Doubt - I might give that one another shot, but halfway through I decided it wasn’t doing much for me outside of their best known single “Right Here Right Now”, and halfway through I started wanting to listen to a hookier, more familiar British “dance rock” album from ‘91. The main “gimmick” of the band is that their lineup includes two bassists, and it’s actually used to a pretty cool effect: One bass is playing the more traditional rhythm role and locking in with the drums, while the other plays more melodic lines that seem to be inspired by New Order’s Peter Hook. Nearly every track being at pop-punk pogoing tempo is both an advantage and a disadvantage - the energy never lets up, and I can imagine this stuff killing live, but by the second half things start feeling just a little bit samey. Still, it’s a winner in terms of music you once could reliably find in thrift stores for a dollar - check out the driving, vaguely environmentalism-themed “Grey Cell Green” and if you like it, there’s 12 more equally catchy songs like it.
Primus - Sailing The Seas of Cheese
It took me maybe a little too long to realize the album title (and the brief opening almost-title-track) wasn’t just picked for absurd whimsy: I’ve been cherry-picking all these relatively “cool” records from 1991, a year sometimes depicted as the year “alternative” broke into the mainstream, but mainstream music of that year still really could be be called a “sea of cheese” (e.g. the #1 Billboard single of that year was Bryan Adams’ “(Everything I Do) I Do It For You”, while the only alternative music to hit the top 10 was EMF’s “Unbelievable”).
An underrated aspect of this band is Les’ lyrics - I especially like it when their songs tell stories about(or from the perspective of) various oddball characters. Here I find them particularly sharp, maybe because there’s sort of loose running themes of non-conformity (“Eleven”, ‘Sgt. Baker”, “Seas of Cheese” again) and the darker side of the American dream (This American Life, Those Damn Blue Collar Tweakers, maybe even Tommy The Cat from a feline perspective). Sometimes the music even furthers the storytelling, like how the intro to “Blue Collar Tweakers” establishes its industrial workplace setting before the lyrics even start by having Larry “Ler” Lalonde’s guitar imitate a factory steam whistle while Les plays a 2 note bass line as mechanically as possible.
I think a key reason this is one of Primus’ most popular albums is that for all the crazy basslines * , unusual time signatures, etc, it does mostly stick to 3 or 4 minute songs with verse chorus verse structures to them - so it’s full of their unique style, and again pretty far from the type of thing that was hitting the top 40, but there’s still just enough of the familiar for a new listener to grab onto.
*Mark Prindle once memorably described the bass line to “Is It Luck?” sounding like “a basset hound knocking the guitar over with his nose”.
Erasure - Chorus
For a change of pace I’m trying to listen to 1991 albums that I actually still have on physical media for a while (mainly CDs, as I already listened to the only 1991 vinyl I have, Slint’s Spiderland - I may have tapes though). Opening track and first single “Chorus” is still the most engaging song to me, with its soaring chorus and almost psychedelic flavor. The album’s other big single is “Love To Hate You”, notable for a cheeky interpolation of Gloria Gaynor’s “I WIll Survive". The rest of the album is really just as good though - there’s just enough traces of early 90s club music and “alternative dance” to keep things fresh, but they stick to their strength of layered, anthemic, and ceaselessly hooky synth pop. “Swan Song” stands out to me for taking a more moody tone than the rest of the album, almost reminding me more of other Vince Clarke-related projects like Depeche Mode or Yaz. Oh, and one cool thing I just noticed going through the CD booklet as I wrote this is that the front and back cover as well as every image in the booklet are all printed with rows of little reflective lower case e’s that are only visible held up to a light source.
Public Enemy - Apocalypse ‘91: The Enemy Strikes Black
I thought the noticeably more minimal production on this album was because they either became more wary of sampling lawsuits or felt they couldn’t top the incredibly sample-dense Fear of a Black Planet and made a conscious effort to scale back a little - but apparently according to member Hank Shocklee, it was a rushed production due to discs of the beats they were working on being stolen. As a result, sometimes songs do feel a bit empty in comparison to what came before - and this isn’t aided by the questionable pacing of essentially having what feels like two album introduction pieces in a row (“Lost At Birth” is almost 4 minutes of self-sampling and adlibs, “Rebirth” is a minute long Chuck D verse set to not much more than a drum loop, and finally third track “Nightrain” is the first thing to feel like an actual “song”).
Still, at its best, it can be hard-hitting enough that I can see where the album still got its share of praise at the time - “By The Time I Get To Arizona” is one of the times the simpler production works, as the bluesy groove of the music, mainly sampled from "Two Sisters of Mystery" by funk group Mandril, fits perfectly with Chuck D’s seething rage over the state of Arizona canceling Martin Luther King Day. Finally, the famous rap-metal remake of “Bring The Noise” featuring Anthrax is a strong closer, and actually a logical move for both sides of the collaboration - Anthrax had their comedic rap-rock single “I’m The Man”, while PE had included rock guitars in previous songs, including sampling Slayer’s “Angel Of Death” for “She Watch Channel Zero?!”
Various Artists - Music From The Motion Picture Soundtrack Until the End of the World
I wanted to review this one because it’s such a 1990s thing to own a movie soundtrack based on the artists on the track-list and then just never get around to seeing the movie - this one includes U2, R.E.M., Depeche Mode, and one of the last original songs Talking Heads would produce as a group. One of the only things I do know about the film is that it was set in 1999, so the artists were asked to envision the kind of music they’d be making by then - and this did apparently result in a pretty consistent, melancholic and dreamy feel, aided by a few cello-based score pieces by Graeme Revell. The song that sounds the most futuristic to my ears might be Neneh Cherry’s “Move with Me (Dub)” for blending the genres of hip hop, electronic music and dub. U2’s title track probably did sound a little futuristic at the time, but is now notable as being the first preview of the more alternative dance flavor they’d take on starting with Achtung Baby.
I think I read Talking Heads agonized about the future music concept, before deciding that in 1999 they’d be writing songs that sound like Talking Heads, and admittedly a few other artists sound like they took that approach: Lou Reed’s “What’s Good” is maybe future-leaning in that it takes kind of a cynical view of technology but just sounds like Lou Reed, and while R.E.M.’s “Fretless” is beautiful, it’s also very much of a piece with the moodier In Time era tracks. j Interestingly, Depeche Mode apparently thought their music would gradually involve less synthesizers instead of more - “Death’s Door” is recognizable as DM due to the melody and vocals, but with an unusually jazzy arrangement featuring electric guitar, drums, and bass.
Metallica - Metallica
I’ve realized I heavily associate this album with carnivals due to a few random personal memories: The first time I heard “Enter Sandman”, the music video was playing on a big screen above a walkway at an amusement park somewhere, I have this distinct memory of being on a Gravitron ride and hearing “Wherever I May Roam” blare as the ride’s centrifugal force caused me to stick to the walls. There might have also been those bootleg mirrors with the album cover as prizes for carnival booths or something. If this says anything about the band and the album, I guess it’s a sign of the place they had just started to occupy in pop culture: loud and “extreme” enough to associate with thrill rides, yet not quite so extreme that encountering them in a family-friendly setting wasn’t totally out of the question. Which is not to claim this is where they “sold out” - it’s more produced than their past albums, as well as a little slower and more melodic, but it’s still a heavy album that’s true to the band - and one I’d still recommend to someone just getting into heavier music.
My Bloody Valentine - Loveless
Like Spiderland, this took a while to get in part because I heard its influence in later artists before I heard the album itself - not even necessarily in other “shoegaze”, as I think this was the first thing I heard in the genre, but things like Smashing Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream and Garbage’s debut. I do think I like this album better than Spiderland, I guess because it still manages to create its own sonic world despite being imitated heavily. When I did first start getting into this album, it was because I noticed the beautiful but unintelligible vocal melodies struggling to be heard under the layers of distortion - I started thinking of it as though I were trying to hear some heavenly music on an extremely weak radio station with the volume turned all the way up and someone vacuuming in the next room, and somehow that worked for me.
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