Music update, October 2022.

October was a big month for new releases, but the one I was probably most excited to hear, Arctic Monkeys’ The Car, was a huge, boring disappointment. I wasn’t that enamored of the new albums from Dry Cleaning or Alvvays, to say nothing of larger acts like Taylor Swift or Tegan & Sara. But for lesser-known acts it was a great month, including a bunch of artists I heard for the first time. As always, if you can’t see the widget below, you can access the playlist here.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6K4bRVCxkcTXo4TrMkqT2q?si=72309fd0f0b54e64

Anxious – Where You Been. This Connecticut punk quintet just dropped their first full-length, Little Green House, and it’s one of the year’s best records, including the 2022 single “In April” (#76 on my top songs of 2021 ranking), “Sunsign,” “Call from You,” and “Let Me.” It’s hard-edged but with a strong melodic sense, too heavy to be punk-pop but too rough-and-ready to be post-punk.

The Lathums – Say My Name. Anthemic indie rock from Wigan, reminiscent of the Amazons but maybe a bit less slick? Their debut album came out last September, but this is the first track from them I’ve heard, from their upcoming LP From Nothing to a Little Bit More, due out February 24th.

The Reytons – Avalanche. That opening riff … it’s Royal Blood, Turbowolf, the Amazons, Death from Above 1979. I can see why this south Yorkshire band are rising stars in the UK. As with the Lathums, they’re new to me, but had an album out last year called The Kids Off the Estate; this is from their upcoming album What’s Rock and Roll?

The Rills – Landslide. Merseyside lads who nod to the Arctic Monkeys and the Libertines as their primary influences. The B-Side, “Spit Me Out,” is almost as good, and maybe the title is a nod to the refrain of the Monkeys’ “Fake Tales of San Francisco?”

Crawlers – I Don’t Want It. This Liverpool band reminds me quite a bit of their neighbors The Mysterines, both led by women singers with powerful voices and crunchy guitar rock behind the vocals.

Black Honey – Out of My Mind. I’ve been on Black Honey’s wavelength since day one, with “Hello Today,” and this track reminds me of a few of their earliest tracks, with a crisper melody and less of the harder edges (which also work) from their second album or this year’s “Charlie Bronson.”

CVC – Good Morning Vietnam. That opening melody line sounds familiar to me, like it might be almost borrowed from something else, but I’m still in on this new Welsh band’s updated psychedelic rock sound.

Inhaler – Love Will Get You There. I feel like Inhaler has produced enough good new music that we can stop talking about who anyone’s father is, although if you listen to any of their tracks you’ll probably realize how much the lead singer sounds like his dad. I love how their sound feels like an evolution of you-know-who without sounding derivative; here it sounds like they’ve been listening to a bit of Lord Huron, incorporating that kind of folk-rock shuffle into their normal style.

Autre ne Veut – Okay. Arthur Ashin’s first new music in seven years, “Okay” is a lovely track that somehow manages to sound lush without coming off as overwritten or overproduced. Critics tend to describe their music as some form of R&B, but I think that sells it a bit short, with jazzier elements and more electronic work in the backdrop.

Cumulus – Teenage Plans. “Can you please slow it down?/It’s too much change to take.” There are so damn many songs about being a teenager and trying to slow down time to appreciate the moment – or being older and wishing you’d thought more like that when you were that age – that it’s rare for something else to break through the monotony, but this new track from Alexandra Lockhart does so, notably with the melody in the chorus.

John-Allison Weiss – Feels Like Hell. I think I liked Weiss’ previous single, “Different Now,” better, but this is also some great indie-pop ahead his 2023 album The Long Way.

The Wombats – I Think My Mind Has Made Its Mind Up. The second track from the Wombats’ forthcoming EP Is This What It Feels Like to Feel Like This?, which will be their second release this year after the full-length LP Fix Yourself, Not the World, which all puts them on track to put out the most good new music of any band this year.

Sports Team – Fingers (Taken Off). Gulp! is one of my favorite albums of the year so far, the second full-length album from this London band who just sound so very English between the vocals and the offbeat lyrics.

The Cool Greenhouse – Get Unjaded. Singer/lyricist Tom Greenhouse has a way with words and packs them into this tight post-punk track, talk-singing his way through a track that slithers like a tritone in search of its resolution.

The Go! Team – Divebomb. The Go! Team have been around for 22 years, so I’m rather remiss in that this was the first song of theirs I’ve heard. Their mix of samples and various pop styles reminds me a bit of the Space Monkeys’ “Sugar Cane” and the more contemporary Bad Sounds.

Young Fathers – I Saw. Heavy Heavy is due out on February 3rd, with this the second very promising single from the Mercury Prize-winning trio, who’ve moved away from their original alternative-rap style to a more experimental lo-fi electronic sound instead.

Archers of Loaf – Screaming Undercover. Reason in Decline is the first new album in 24 years from this Chapel Hill band, who had a brief run of critical success and built a cult following in the mid-90s with their hard-edged indie rock sound.

Crystal Axis – Black AF. This is the third single from Crystal Axis, a Nairobi Afro-punk band whose lyrics are a mix of Swahili and English. I found them via this BBC profile.

Pinkshift – nothing (in my head). One of two tracks from this Baltimore trio’s new EP i’m not crying you’re crying. If you wondered what Paramore would sound like if they didn’t suck, this is a pretty good approximation. The title track from the EP is solid too.

Quicksand – Felíz. Another remnant from the Distant Populations sessions, but man, if this is what you leave on the cutting room floor, you are doing something very right. This thing rocks with this giant muscular riff that frames the sludgy chorus, where they sound most like the post-hardcore icons they are. They’re on tour right now with Clutch and Helmet, in case you wanted to wonder what year it was.

Blessed – Anything. This Canadian art-rock band announced their second full-length album, Circuitous, and released this lead single, which has a very doom- or sludge-metal feel without the big crunch.

Gojira – Our Time Is Now. I’ve been listening to less metal overall this year, but I will stop traffic for a new Gojira song, and this track has a glorious opening followed by some intense riffing in the verse before the bottom-heavy chorus.

Top 14 albums of 2014.

My Insider content from the last few days:
* The Jimmy Rollins trade
* The Mat Latos and Alfredo Simon trades
* The Matt Kemp trade
* The Rick Porcello/Yoenis Cespedes trade
* The Wade Miley trade
* The Howie Kendrick/Andrew Heaney trade and Brandon McCarthy signing
* The Dee Gordon trade
* The Jon Lester signing
* The Francisco Liriano re-signing
* The Miguel Montero trade
* The Jeff Samardzija trade (and David Robertson signing) and Oakland’s return
* The Jason Hammel signing
* The Brandon Moss trade

My review of the boardgame Concordia is up at Paste, and I did an interview about baseball and metal with Decibel.

My ranking of the top 14 albums of the year is below, and reflects my own personal preferences, with a balance between albums that have a few standout songs and ones that worked better as cohesive units. You can see last year’s top 13 albums list for a comparison and to see if something you expected to see here actually made last year’s list (e.g., CHVRCHES, Arctic Monkeys). I heard a lot more than I ranked here, but getting to fourteen albums I truly liked and would recommend wasn’t even easy.

Linked album titles go to full reviews. My ranking of the top 100 songs of the year will follow in a few days.

14. The Kooks – Listen. Goofy British pop-rock songs that didn’t work so well as a collection, especially with a few tracks worth skipping, but featured a number of very strong singles, including “Bad Habit,” “Down,” and “Forgive and Forget.”

13. Animals as Leaders – The Joy of Motion. (amazoniTunes) An all-instrumental technical/progressive metal-fusion record … or something like that. If you love guitarwork, including jazz-inspired soloing, with unconventional song structures, featuring numerous musicians operating at the far right end of what is possible with their instruments, you’ll love this album. Otherwise, maybe just move on to #12.

12. To Kill a King – Exit, Pursued by a Bear. (amazoniTunes) It’s an EP, which is kind of cheating since I hadn’t included EP releases on previous lists, but 1) this is my list so I get to make up the rules 2) I love the title and 3) it’s a really fucking good EP. They remind me in particular of Animals that Swim, a British band from the 1990s and early 2000s that made folk-rock songs that often sounded like great drinking songs and made great use of horns as well as guitars. To Kill a King aren’t afraid to work the horns, the acoustic and electric guitar, the piano, unconventional percussion sounds, and backup harmonies that range from the typical to the borderline-annoying. Wikipedia’s entry compares them to The National, but To Kill a King’s lead singer actually sings rather than mumbling his lyrics. Opener “Oh My Love” plays like a dirge with a nod to Andrew Marvell; “Love is Coal” seems like a straight middle finger to Mumford & Sons and all of their clones, saying “this is how you do the slow-fast-slow thing, posers.”

11. Insomnium – Shadows of a Dying Sun. The best metal album of the year for me comes from this Finnish melodic death-metal act previously known for primarily downbeat and often soporific music that wasn’t saved by the technical prowess of its guitarists. Shadows brings them much more firmly into the melodic camp, with the occasional clean vocal, far more ornate song structures (with actual movements in some tracks), and somewhat less dreary lyrics. There aren’t many bands operating in this demilitarized zone between classic thrash, classical metal, and straight-up death metal, but it’s a sweet spot for my particular tastes.

As an aside, my top metal albums of the year: Insomnium, Animals as Leaders, Pallbearer’s Foundations of Burden, Horrendous’ Ecdysis, and At the Gates’ At War With Reality.

10. Band of Skulls – Himalayan. I like to rock, or more specifically, I like to listen to bands that rock, preferably without apology or relent. (I do like to rock a little, though.) Band of Skulls draws deeply on genres from 1970s classic rock to the more commercial part of 1990s grunge, and most of this album is driven by huge guitar riffs, blues shuffles, and bass-heavy grooves. This is music for people who just love hard rock that isn’t metal and still boasts great melodies, from the title track, “Asleep at the Wheel,” “Toreador,” and the psycheledic “Nightmares.”

9. Ex Hex – Rips. It’s good to have Mary Timony, formerly of noise-rock icons Helium and the all-female Wild Flag (with Carrie Brownstein of Sleater-Kinney, whose 2015 album should appear on my list next year), back with a new band. Ex Hex is punk-pop more than anything else, hook-filled with a slew of short, punchy, fast-paced songs that are a little light lyrically but incredibly fun to listen to, including “Beast,” “Don’t Wanna Lose,” and “New Kid.”

8. Kaiser Chiefs – Education, Education, Education, and War. The big comeback album for the band best known for their 2004 hit “I Predict a Riot” was by far their most mature, measured, balanced effort ever, easing up on the overly clever lyrics just a bit and filling the album with compelling hooks and more nuanced songwriting. Lead single “Coming Home” found them almost serious and pensive, while “Cannons,” “Ruffians on Parade” and opener “The Factory Gates” brought the electricity you’d expect from the Chiefs along with newly thoughtful, sardonic lyrics. This album, with a title mocking a speech once given by Tony Blair, didn’t chart in the U.S., but hit #1 in the UK and went gold, their best showing since their second album came out in 2007.

7. Broods – Evergreen. (amazoniTunes) This New Zealand brother-and-sister duo first hit with their single “Bridges,” a top 10 song for me this year due to its stunning contrast from the sweet, piano-driven verse to the thumping chorus where singer Georgia Nutt shifts up to a falsetto that almost strains her range. Their full album has great contrasts throughout within that dream-pop/electronic framework, most with strong melodies, showing a lot of range for a very young pair of songwriters on their first album.

6. …And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead – IX. With their ninth album (duh), the ol’ Trail of Dead are at their most melodic and textured, with tremendous percussion work by their tandem of drummers and hypnotic, swirling guitar lines, without losing the structural complexity that has marked nearly all of their work. It might not have received the insane acclaim of Source Tags and Codes, but it’s a more accessible and thoughtful album, led by “The Doomsday Book,” “Jaded Apostles,” “Lie Without a Liar,” and the closer “Sound of the Silk” that just left me on the floor gasping for air.

5. Spoon – They Want My Soul. Spoon has become, for me, the definitive American rock band, or perhaps rock-and-roll band, drawing as they do on influences from throughout rock history while incorporating folk, country, and more current electronic elements in their songs. They Want My Soul was a bounceback of sorts after a pair of less exciting albums, bringing more experimentation and a wider range of styles with barely any hiccups along the way (other than the single “Inside Out”). You’ve heard and probably liked the straightforward singles “Rent I Pay” and “Do You,” but when Spoon get nostalgic on the cover “You Just Don’t Understand” or start playing around with structure and synths on “Outlier” or “Knock Knock Knock” they manage to expand boundaries without losing their ability to craft compelling hooks.

4. HAERTS – Haerts. Three of the five best songs on here appeared on an EP late last year, but that’s not to say the remaining songs on the band’s full-length debut, produced by St. Lucia (who appeared on last year’s list with his own debut album), which all showcase singer Nini Fabi’s powerful, slightly smoky voice over masterfully crafted strata of keyboards and drum machines. “Giving Up” is the best new song and the only one on my top 100 this year, but “Wings,” “Hemiplegia,” and “All the Days” are standouts from their first EP.

3. alt-J – This is All Yours. It wasn’t as groundbreaking or mindblowing as their debut album, An Awesome Wave, my favorite album not just of 2012 but of the decade so far, so I could call This is All Yours a mild letdown … and yet it’s still a work of great imagination and continues the trio’s refusal to work within the conventions of modern music, even within what’s generally called “alternative” but isn’t quite as radical as the name might indicate. This is All Yours is uneven, with a few songs they could just as easily have omitted (“Choice Kingdom” and “Pusher” in particular), but they soar with the manic complexity of “Every Other Freckle,” the slow expansion of “The Gospel of John Hurt,” the four-vocalist gimmick that actually plays on “Warm Foothills,” and the so-bad-it’s good “Left Hand Free.” It’s not as cleanly produced as their debut, unfortunately, which cuts into the atmosphere it creates and stunts the beauty of tracks like “Warm Foothills” or “Hunger of the Pine.”

2. New Pornographers – Brill Bruisers. I don’t know how a collection of singers and songwriters this broad and diverse could push out an album this cohesive, but Brill Bruisers is an ebullient power-pop masterpiece; what it might lack in invention (compared to, say, Twin Cinema) it more than makes up for via its sheer pop brilliance. The title track is one of the best songs of the year, landing in my top 10, but “Dancehall Domine,” “Fantasy Fools,” and “War on the East Coast” all shimmer with gorgeous pop hooks and note-perfect performances across the board.

1. Hundred Waters – The Moon Rang Like a Bell. (amazoniTunes) I never reviewed this album because I didn’t quite get it when I first received it a review copy back in May; it was just too weird, too unconventional, almost the way I never quite got the Cocteau Twins. But I kept coming back to certain songs that stuck with me – “Xtalk,” “Innocent,” “Out Alee” – and realized the issue was that I had to get used to the production, which put singer Nicole Miglis’s voice so front and center that you can almost hear her thinking. This is cerebral music, but that doesn’t mean it requires more of the listener than an open mind; think of Hundred Waters’s songs as the pattern on a lake when hit by a raindrop or a skipped stone, with each track within a song rippling outward on its own to create a gorgeous, cohesive whole. I haven’t heard anything quite like it before, which is something I want to say about any album I’m calling the best of its year.

Royal Blood and Opeth.

Royal Blood put out one of my favorite songs of the first half of this year, but their self-titled debut album didn’t come out until the very end of August, a long wait from the hype and airplay they received from “Out of the Black” in the first few months of 2014. Royal Blood delivers on the promise of that first track with a compact half-hour of loud, hard, hook-filled tracks, nothing that breaks new ground, just heavy earworms for folks who like rock that rocks.

“Out of the Black” is one of the best songs of 2014, an huge, heavy bass-and-drum track that comes in so loud and hard that you would swear it was multiple guitars, not the work of a two-piece band that recorded everything without overdubs or multiple instruments. The synchronized drum and machine-gun bass riff that opens the song follows up with a vast, distorted sonic boom that, here, announces the entire album’s arrival – this is loud, heavy, unapologetic rock music. It’s produced in a different way, but the aural effect is familiar.

The best tracks on Royal Blood remind me a lot of one of my favorite under-the-radar albums of late last year, the self-titled debut from Drenge, another UK-based two-piece rock. The initial riff to “Come on Over,” maybe the album’s second-best track after the opener, could easily have come from Drenge. Where Drenge stayed in the post-punk lane, Royal Blood runs more with the blues-rock aesthetic of 1970s hard rock and British Heavy Metal. With huge riffs and frequent stops and starts, most of the tracks on Royal Blood would fit in on Ozzy’s Boneyard on Sirius XM in between songs from Iron Maiden and Saxon.

That bluesy feel – it’s not really “blues” in the traditional sense – comes out more when they turn the amps down slightly, as on “You Can Be So Cruel,” which sacrifices none of the heaviness of the rest of the album but drives more than it thumps. It’s also a great example of how bassist Mike Kerr manages to create a full sound just with his bass and heavy distortion, music that you would otherwise swear had come from two six-string guitars working in tandem. His technique is more apparent on “Blood Hands” because he moderates his picking slightly to make some of the individual notes clearer and less distorted.

They’re also going to get a lot of Jack White comparisons because of Kerr’s vocal style and their shared use of heavily distorted guitar lines played in isolation or just over a drum beat. The interstitial riffs on “Careless” feel ripped straight from a great Jack White or White Stripes track – and I can’t figure out how he can produce notes that high on a traditional bass guitar., while the descending staircase vocals of “Figure It Out” also bring White’s voice and songwriting to mind. But there are little allusions to other genres that White wouldn’t incorporate into his straight-up rockers – like the syncopated, funk-tinged riffs of “Ten-Tonne Skeleton” or the hints at early doom on “You Can Be So Cruel.”

Royal Blood‘s brief 32 minutes don’t allow the duo much time to introduce anything new or innovative, although I don’t think that was part of their mission statement. They had a bunch of hooks, and a new kind of sound they wanted to introduce, two counts on which they were successful. At some point, they’ll have to expand the formula; for now, a half-hour that rocks works just fine.

I also missed the release of Opeth’s latest album, Pale Communion, their second in their new incarnation as a prog-rock outfit. It’s hard to believe this is the same band that produced the watershed progressive death-metal album Blackwater Park, which combined death-growl doom-metal vocals with classical music influences and Gothenburg-style riffing in epic tracks that could run 10-12 minutes. Pale Communion sounds more like King Crimson or Marillion than it does like At the Gates or In Flames, with clean, sometimes harmonized vocals, intricate song structures (the one real holdover from their earlier output), and influences that range as far afield as folk and jazz. Opener “Eternal Rains Will Come” is pure 1970s prog-rock with some gorgeous instrumental passages, while “Cusp of Eternity” incorporates more hard-rock elements with a huge classic-rock guitar solo before the Hammond organ – which practically defines this album – returns.

It’s still brilliant, the kind of intelligent songwriting you can easily recognize, but it’s also a challenging listen because of the unconventional structure and lack of clear hooks. I don’t agree with Pitchfork’s review, which savaged the album mostly because it’s not the old Opeth, but I do agree with the reviewer’s specific criticism that the album doesn’t feel like its musical ideas are new, only its structures and arrangements. Opeth was so groundbreaking in their death-metal phase, defying conventions of even the adventurous melodic death metal movements of Gothenburg and Finland, that it’s a little odd to hear them as a prog-rock outfit that doesn’t seem to bring many new ideas or energies. Pale Communion is still among the best albums of the year, because of its ambition and sheer intelligence; I just want a band that has historically been so full of ideas to bring that same creativity to their new sound.

The Dagger & The Monuments’ The Amanuensis.

My Futures Game preview went up this morning, and I did a Klawchat on Thursday. I’ll be at the Futures Game, of course, and will head to the Butcher & Boar stand out by right field after BP, around 3 pm. Hope to see many of you there.

The Dagger’s self-titled debut album (due out July 22) is one of the strangest releases you’ll hear this year – the music itself isn’t odd at all, as the eleven tracks are all very straightforward blues-rock songs, the kind of tracks you’d expect to hear on a classic-rock station. What’s strange is that the trio of death metal musicians in the band have produced a record that, if you didn’t know it was new, you’d assume was written and recorded in the late 1970s. It’s not especially innovative and a little lacking in certain areas, but if The Dagger wanted to bring the New Wave of British Heavy Metal back to life, they’ve succeeded.

Three of The Dagger’s members were once part of the defunct death metal band Dismember, and here they’re joined by Swedish vocalist Jani Kataja, who sang in a pair of stoner-metal acts before joining the Dagger in 2010. (It’s not that strange a transition for Kataja; Bill Steer, co-founder of Carcass and former Napalm Death guitarist, had a blues-metal side project called Firebird before Carcass reunited a few years ago.) Their bio specifically refers to Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Rainbow, and Deep Purple as influences, although I also hear a lot of lesser-known acts from that era like Saxon and Quartz, bands that leaned toward the less heavy, more melodic end of the range. You’ll hear that especially on The Dagger‘s best tracks, “1978” and “Inside the Monolithic Dome,” songs driven primarily by brief, pronounced guitar riffs and mid-tempo rhythm sections.

As a whole, however, the album feels far too familiar, as if these are actually songs we all heard in the late ’70s or early ’80s but haven’t heard much since because they were overshadowed by stronger tracks. There aren’t enough memorable hooks, and the lyrics vary from weak to embarrassing (“Nocturnal Triumph” is just cringe-inducing, which is too bad as the guitar lines behind the verses would make it a great driving song). The Dagger appear to be more influenced by bands that drew from blues-rock rather than acts like Maiden or Priest that used faster tempos and, in Maiden’s case, more technical skills that came down from classical roots.

The Monuments’ sophomore album, The Amanuensis, melds progressive metal with heavier “groove” elements – I hate the term, but it does fit here – like a blend of early Fates Warning and peak Pantera, with both clean and screamed vocals along with fugal guitar lines. There isn’t enough variety across the entire album, with many of the guitar melodies sounding too similar in structure, but it’s a highly precise, almost severe album, with appropriately serious lyrics. They also get bonus points for naming a song “Horcrux.”

That song and “Origin of Escape” are among the highlights of Amanuensis for the variation within each song – changing tempos, lyrical styles, but still relying on the same staccato-picked guitar riffs that populate the entire disc, so the second half of the album starts to sound too much like background noise. “Atlas” begins with the clichéd death-metal growl but morphs into a jazz-metal track, a little less experimental than Cynic or Atheist might have produced but in a similar vein, with a seamless transition into the very similar “Horcrux,” which makes better use of undistorted passages to break up the monotony of the austere up-and-down lead guitar lines, concluding with the counterpoint pairing that makes the song the strongest on the entire disc. (It doesn’t hurt that the song also includes the highest ratio of clean to growled lyrics of the eleven tracks here.) But by the time we get to track five, “Garden of Sankhara,” the lead guitar riff style, both in meter and technique, has become too familiar already. Using the same motif across an entire album can be clever, providing a measure of artistic unity to a set of disparate songs, but the Monuments take it too far.

The Monuments rose from the ashes of English experimental-metal act Fellsilent, who had a cult following among fans of extreme metal but lacked enough of a melodic component to find a broader audience or to appeal to me. The Amanuensis is a significant step in that direction, even further towards the commercial end of the extreme-metal spectrum than their debut album, Gnosis, although it’s best consumed in small chunks, with a focus on the first four tracks of the disc – which on their own would have made an outstanding EP release. It’s not up to the standard set by Insomnium earlier this year but worth the $6 amazon is asking for the album right now.

Himalayan.

Himalayan, the third album from English rock trio Band of Skulls, finds the band moving into more nuanced, original territory, keeping the heavy guitar sounds and blues-rock influences from their last album Sweet Sour but stepping up the songcraft enough to make it sound like something new. There are plenty of winks and nods to other bands, some welcome and some tired, but the result is powerful and intense, and one of the best albums I’ve heard so far this year. (It’s $6.99 through that amazon link above; it’s also on iTunes for $9.99, including a bonus track.)

Band of Skulls have taken some heat for sounding too derivative of other artists, but if you’re going to be derivative, at least be derivative of a broad list of influences – and Band of Skulls certainly do that. You could pick out Black Sabbath (“Asleep at the Wheel”), Led Zeppelin (“Heaven’s Key”), and White Stripes (“I Guess I Know You Fairly Well”), but there’s also Marilyn Manson (“Hoochie Coochie”), Arcade Fire (“Nightmares”), and even a little Bowie (“I Feel Like Ten Men, Nine Dead and One Dying”).

The twin strengths of Band of Skulls are the huge guitar riffs by Russell Marsden and the shared vocals between Marsden and bassist Emma Richardson, with the two aspects helping balance each other – the riffs border on New Wave of British Heavy Metal territory, but the harmonies and female vocals provide the contrast to keep them off Ozzy’s Boneyard. The album starts with the lead single, “Asleep at the Wheel,” built around a riff to make Tony Iommi or Brian Tatler proud, but the lead-in is, appropriately, a driving minor-chord pattern from ’70s AOR, leading into the title track’s Zeppelin-esque rhythm guitars, a track that makes great use of the two vocalists in its chorus.

That takes us to the most interesting song on the album, “Hoochie Coochie,” which sounds for all the world like a reconstructed take on Marilyn Manson’s “The Beautiful People,” right down to the high/low vocal pattern, but with a guitar part more in line with vintage Iron Maiden for its faster tempo. Himalayan‘s shortest track, clocking in at a brisk 2:40 and never letting up on the groove that drives the verses, the song probably has as little to say lyrically as any other on the album, but the main guitar riff gives such a strong impression of wheels turning at high speed that the song compels further listens – and the Bonhamesque percussion, present on several tracks here, helps add to the sense of urgency.

Band of Skulls deviates once more from their basic blues-rock formula with “Toreador,” which is the first hard-rock paso doble song I can remember hearing, with the guitar and drum playing a synchronized two-step rhythm behind the vocals (sung by Richardson), referring to the bullfight as “just a cloak-and-dagger score.” Rapid tempo shifts evoke the changing directions of the toreo, leading into a machine-gun riff that once again calls Adrian Smith’s early work to mind, until the uncertain conclusion after one more iteration of the chorus. It’s a clever transposition of two styles that wouldn’t seem to have any natural connection, and probably has more airplay potential than anything else on the album.

Himalayan can drag when Band of Skulls decides to slow things down, exposing both the weak nature of some of their lyrics and the lack of texture inherent in a trio when you have to turn off the heavy distortion of the lead guitar; for example, “I Feel Like Ten Men, Nine Dead and One Dying” starts off like a Doves B-side, leaving the listener waiting for the Big Crunch to arrive (which it does, in the chorus). “Nightmares” is the album’s strongest mid-tempo song, with the ethereal production of pre-Reflektor Arcade Fire, but again the weak lyrics become more noticeable when the guitars are toned down. There are more than enough high-energy tracks and passages on Himalayan to make up for some soft spots, and I particularly enjoyed its updating of classic sounds from the late-70s/early-80s period of British hard rock and metal that was prevalent even when I was in high school a few years after that. When Band of Skulls decide they want to rock, they rock. They just need to do more of that.

Manchester Orchestra’s Cope.

Manchester Orchestra’s newest album, Cope, has the biggest guitar sound I can remember hearing on any record, gigantic, immersive riffs that I’d love to hear when I plug my own axe into an amplifier. Hell, I want these chords to play any time I enter a room. If Sam Cassell pretended to hold guitar riffs instead of his balls after making a big play, he’d be holding the riffs from Cope.

MO layers these riffs over lugubrious rhythms that derive more from doom metal (acts like Trouble or Cathedral) than from any subgenre in the indie or alternative rock worlds, a formula that produces an uneven album but that works more often than it doesn’t, especially given the naturally despairing tone of Andy Hull’s voice. Album opener and first single “Top Notch” best demonstrates this combination of left- and right-hand paths, with an enormous crunch to open the track that evokes early Black Sabbath both in its force and in the use of sudden transitions from high-intensity riffs to slow, quiet passages beneath the lyrics, the strongest on the disc. The lyrical yearning pairs with the tantalizing pause and buildup into each chorus; the quick stops after each riff leave you standing at the edge of a crumbling cliff, waiting for the next giant crunch to arrive, only to have it come a beat later than you expected.

When MO utilize that set of contrasts – loud/quiet, staccato finishes/tentative restarts – they provide Cope with its strongest tracks, including the opener, “The Mansion,” the 6/4 track “The Ocean,” and “Trees,” the last of which has an opening lick that could have come off a recent Black Keys album. The plaintive riff that opens the waltz “All That I Really Wanted” prop up the generic expressions of regret in the verses – Cope isn’t Hull’s strongest work as a lyricist – in a track that might have served as a better closer than the title track. “The Mansion” is more straightforward, at least in tone and time signature, but another dramatic shift into the chorus punctuates the rather morbid verses that precede each one.

However, when the pace picks up, the music becomes a little one-note – the harmonies sound overproduced, the tension is lacking, and the weaker lyrics become more noticeable. “Girl Harbor” sounds like an aborted attempt at a straight pop song, lacking not only the huge riffs that distinguish the album as a whole but even missing any kind of dissonant or contrasting note to tone down the saccharine lyrics. “Every Stone” is similarly upbeat without balance; that’s not who Manchester Orchestra is, and it’s certainly not what they do best, so when they head in this direction, the harsh or heavy elements are notable by their absence. Those vocal harmonies work so well in the midst of a song that otherwise borders on hard rock or metal, but they risk coming too close to OneRepublic when they indulge in those harmonies without that note of acidity to create a more complete dish.

Cope represents a step forward again for Manchester Orchestra, whose critically-acclaimed 2011 release Simple Math dwelled too much on insular, tenebrous sounds and didn’t have anywhere near the aural appeal of this album. Some listeners may not appreciate the shift from indie-rock quirkiness (like Simple Math‘s “Pensacola”) to full-on metal-tinged rock, but of all of the stylistic dialects the band has tried, this one suits Andy Hull’s voice and lyrics the best, even with some inconsistencies in their transition to this kind of sound.

I take a fair amount of time to review albums, giving them as many listens as I think necessary to write up a proper review, which means I won’t usually have a review out the day an album’s released (only if I have a promo copy), and I won’t review every album I hear. I’m hoping to write up at least three more recent releases before draft season starts to overwhelm me – Band of Skulls’ Himalayan, Jimi Goodwin’s Odludek, and The War on Drugs’ Lost in the Dream.

Top 200 rock songs of the 1990s.

I promised you a list of my 100 favorite rock songs from the 1990s, but after a few weeks of listing and ranking tracks I realized I couldn’t get away with fewer than 150 … which became 162 (a good baseball number, at least) … which became 175 … and finally stopped at 200, which still left a few good songs* on the outside.

* Those would include the Charlatans UK’s “Impossible,” Stereophonics’ “Local Boy in the Photograph” and “Just Lookin’,” Dodgy’s “Staying Out for the Summer,” Soul Coughing’s “$300,” Lenny Kravitz’s “Let Love Rule,” Offspring’s “Come Out and Play (Keep ‘Em Separated),” and Nirvana’s “Man Who Sold the World,” among others.

Just like the previous list for the 2000s, this is a ranking of personal preference, not an objective measure of chart performance. If I don’t like a song, it ain’t here. There’s no rap or hip-hop because I didn’t want the list to run to 250 or 300 tracks, at which point I probably would never have finished it.

All links go to amazon.com’s MP3 downloads, so if a song is unlinked, it’s not available for individual purchase, and I’m not going to suggest to anyone that they buy a whole album to get one song, since those days should be firmly behind us by now.

The last list brought a number of new readers to the site, so if you’re one of them: Welcome. If you choose to comment, I moderate the site, so new users’ comments don’t appear until I’ve cleared them from the queue.

200. Harvey Danger – “Flagpole Sitta.” The sneering slacker anthem for the second half of the decade. Overplayed by a factor of 300% in “retro” music blocks on alternative stations.

199. Auteurs – “Everything You Say Will Destroy You.” Truer words were never spoken.

198. Siouxsie and the Banshees – “Kiss Them For Me.” An ode to Jayne Mansfield and an unusually restrained song for the Banshees. It always cracked me up that Siouxsie Sioux’s first TV appearances was in the background of the infamous Sex Pistols appearance on Bill Grundy’s talk show.

197. The Descendents – “I’m The One.” This song should probably be higher up the list, but I was just about done with the ranking when I realized I’d forgotten it entirely. Definitely among the best punk-revival songs of its era, without the excess polish of Green Day, the Offspring, or even Bad Religion.

196. Sleeper – “Nice Guy Eddie.” Apparently this song is about Reservoir Dogs, which was (and is) lost on me, but it’s a great Britpop song with a few clever lines, but it’s elevated by the marriage of its lyrics and its music – there’s nothing special about the line “It may sound funny but it wasn’t supposed to,” but the specific way Louise Wener (who was kinda hot) sang it, coupled with the lines that came before, made the line something more. And Wener was, in fact, pretty clever, commenting on how the Boo Radleys received better reviews in the press because their members “look[ed] like journalists.”

195. Filter – “Take A Picture.” Filter had two moments of greatness. This was the lesser one.

194. Blur – “Country House.” The song that rhymed Balzac with Prozac. Win.

193. Ned’s Atomic Dustbin – “Kill Your Television.” Perhaps counterproductive advice given my current job.

192. Collective Soul – “Heavy.” Well, heavy for Collective Soul, at least.

191. Muse – “Muscle Museum.” From Wikipedia, which we know is never wrong: “It was named “Muscle Museum” when the band couldn’t think of a name for the song so they looked ‘Muse’ up in the dictionary, picking the words immediately before and after. “

190. White Zombie – “More Human Than Human.” White Zombie went from noise-rock band to thrash band to heavy-metal-joke band, finding not just commercial success in the last phase but a Grammy nomination for the regrettable “Thunder Kiss ’65.” “More Human Than Human” also earned a Grammy nomination, but it’s a far better, tighter song than its predecessor.

189. Cast – “Sandstorm.” I actually heard this song in a Home Depot once, which is one more time than I ever heard it on a U.S. radio station, although I believe I later caught “Beat Mama” on WFNX. Cast was founded by the bassist from alternative darlings The La’s and pushed out a number of power-pop singles worth checking out, a list that also includes “Alright” and “Fine Time.”

188. Urge Overkill – “Sister Havana.” The Neil Diamond cover was the worst thing that could have happened to these guys, as it tanked their career just as they were getting interesting.

187. Bush – “The Chemicals Between Us.” Even a crappy faux-grunge act occasionally gets it right, in this case by the addition of some electronic elements and added layering in production.

186. These Animal Men – “Empire Building.” Let’s get a hotel room in Paris/With that French girlfriend that volunteered to share us.

185. Smashing Pumpkins – “Muzzle.” Like a lost track from Siamese Dream, harkening back even to Gish.

184. Stereophonics – “The Bartender And The Thief.” I originally thought I’d have more Stereophonics on this list, but while I like a good number of their songs, it’s more a matter of liking their sound than finding individual songs so compelling. This fast-paced track presaged their biggest hit, “Dakota,” a decade later.

183. Jane’s Addiction – “Stop.” I would have had this much higher had it not been for the tempo-shattering bridge in the middle of the song (“hurrah”), without which the track would have been a three-minute adrenaline rush for the ages.

182. Travis – “Driftwood.” I’m not sure it’s a better song than “Writing to Reach You,” but “Driftwood” is one of those songs I always seem to play when I find time to pick up the guitar, so here it is.

181. The Breeders – “Cannonball.” I understand that MTV exposure helped make this song a hit, but I would have preferred it if I’d never seen the snotty video, even more obnoxious than the Pixies’ video for “Here Comes Your Man.” But good luck getting the song out of your head, inane lyrics and all.

180. Ocean Colour Scene – “The Riverboat Song.” More than their standard blues-rock hybrid, “Riverboat” has a menacing feel that wasn’t present in some of their other top songs, like “The Day We Caught the Train.”

179. Cracker – “Low.” Overrated because of the then-scandalous reference to “being stoned.” I’ll give them a few bonus points for David Lowery and Johnny Hickman’s cover of “Pictures of Matchstick Men” as part of Camper Van Beethoven.

178. Radiohead – “The Bends.” Title track from an album that would have been the best of most bands’ careers … but not theirs.

177. Pure – “Tall Grass.” Pure was a Canadian band that marketers tried to attach to the Seattle train with no success, but they were more musical dilettantes, dabbling in psychedelic rock, mixing in a brass line, or writing venomous semi-acoustic tracks like this one. “Greed,” “Anna,” and “Laughing Like a Fiend” were also standouts from their three albums and handful of EPs.

176. The Cure – “High.” I’m a Disintegration guy when it comes to the Cure, but “High” remains the highlight of their career since that breakthrough disc, an airy, bittersweet love song, as opposed to the twee-pop money-grab of “Friday I’m in Love.”

175. Days of the New – “Enemy.” The preening, the look, the vocal style that was half Vedder and half Cornell … I can see why Days of the New were lightly regarded after their first album, although “Touch, Peel, and Stand” has its merits. But “Enemy,” from their second album, represented a real expansion of their sound, with electronic elements and a different kind of song structure that, unfortunately, didn’t find an audience.

174. The Boo Radleys – “C’mon Kids.” And fuck the ones/who tell you that life/is merely the time before dying. Yeah! Unfortunately this one doesn’t appear to be available for download (at least in the U.S., which annoys me to no end), but they did have another hit with the sunnier, poppier “Wake Up Boo!.”

173. Stereophonics – “A Thousand Trees.” The lyrics here could be about anything and I’d still have it on the list, but as it turns out they tell a good story of how one damaging rumor can destroy someone’s life.

172. Screaming Trees – “Shadow Of The Season.” The very simple guitar riff that opens the song, followed by a Bonham-esque drum line, grabs your attention, and Mark Lonegan’s distinctive baritone ushers you in. How this album, Sweet Oblivion, which put another song higher up this list, didn’t go multi-platinum is beyond me.

171. The Black Crowes – “Remedy.” Their first album was the big seller, but it didn’t have a song to match “Remedy,” which is what Oasis would have produced if they’d been a southern blues-rock act, a dense, over-the-top, relentless track that borrows heavily from its influences without sounding derivative.

170. James – “I Know What I’m Here For.” James specialized in songs that were simultaneously upbeat but with lyrics filled with doubt or wistful longings; this almost bouncy song brings unusually confident lyrics that make it sound more like an anthem.

169. Alice in Chains – “Them Bones.” Usually rock songs with odd time signatures are just masturbatory exercises, but the odd meters and changes between them in this song give it an unbalanced feel that adds to the sense of doom in the lyrics.

168. Soundgarden – “Burden In My Hand.” I remember reading an interview with Chris Cornell in Newsday in the early 1990s where he talked about his lyrical influences as Kafka, Camus, and Celine. That was evident on Badmotorfinger, but he simplified his approach greatly on Soundgarden’s final two albums. This song was one exception, as I can certainly see Camus’ The Stranger in here.

167. Beck – “Where It’s At.” When this song was current, shortly after my wife and I got married, my in-laws were visiting for the weekend and we were driving to dinner somewhere while I had WFNX on, playing this song, obviously, or I wouldn’t be using it as the comment here. There’s a shrill beeping behind the chorus, spurring my mother-in-law to chime in from the back seat, “This song is really annoying.” She’s never really gotten Beck, I have to say.

166. Metallica – “Enter Sandman.” If you listen closely around the 2:43 mark, yYou can actually hear the death of thrash metal in this song. (And yes, I’ve used a variation of this joke before.) It’s a fun song to play on the guitar, but should Metallica songs actually be fun to play? How could the band that produced “Master of Puppets” or “Blackened” or “Ride the Lightning” produce this, the metal equivalent of a pop song? I’m so conflicted.

165. Sting – “Mad About You.” Outside of Prince, was there a more important single artist in rock music from, say, 1975 to 1995 – more or less my formative years as a music fan – than Sting? The Police were and remain criminally underrated by the public, although I remember them being critical darlings, and Sting’s early solo career saw him integrating multiple styles of music across tracks on a single album. Unfortunately, The Soul Cages was the end of Sting as an adventurous solo artist and the beginning of his career as an adult contemporary artist, with just one standout track for me, this acoustic ballad with lyrics rife with literary allusions.

164. Skid Row – “Monkey Business.” Skid Row’s career arc fascinates me, because I’m pretty sure that after their first album, they were absolutely doomed even if they’d followed it up with a disc that combined the best aspects of Zeppelin IV, Revolver, and Love. They were initially marketed as a hair-metal act, and after their first album spawned two crappy ballads as hits (“18 and Life” and “I Remember You”), their audience comprised a ton of teenage girls and anyone seriously into metal or rock looked on them as the critical equivalent of Warrant or Britny Fox. As it turned out, Skid Row then put out a relatively sophisticated metal album in Slave to the Grind, led by this track, which sported a surprising combination of technical guitar work, vocal gymnastics, and memorable hooks. The album’s title track is also worth checking out, and it wouldn’t have been out of place on Metallica’s black album.

163. Prince – “7.” I go back and forth on this song as much as I do on any Prince track – sometimes I think it’s brilliant, sometimes I think it’s ridiculous.

162. Stone Temple Pilots – “Vasoline.” The lyrics were on the dumb side, but it’s built on a guitar riff that burrows into your brain, and they kept the song short and tight rather than beat that riff into the ground.

161. Placebo – “Pure Morning.” A friend in need’s a friend indeed/A friend with weed is better.

160. Beastie Boys – “Sure Shot.” I’m a big Paul’s Boutique guy – that has to be one of the five most important albums of the last 30 years – but never got quite as into the Beastie Boys’ more alternative-oriented music after that album, which wasn’t a commercial success but has become a major hip-hop classic, one that won’t likely be repeated or approached because of the royalties issues around such heavy sampling. “Sure Shot” is one of the more straight-up rap songs I heard from the Boys in the ’90s, so it’s well above bigger hits like “Intergalactic” for me.

159. Blink 182 – “What’s My Age Again??” I originally thought this song’s lyrics were stupid, along the lines of everything else I’d heard from them, but after hearing it a dozen times, I caught it on WFNX while driving down Fresh Pond Parkway and reinterpreted the song as an ode not to immaturity but to retaining a sense of the frivolous in the face of the seriousness of adult life – almost a wistful look at youth against time’s inexorable pull into middle age and its attendant responsibilities. Or maybe it’s just a song about being a jerk.

158. Gin Blossoms – “Hey Jealousy.” So the guy who wrote their two best songs suffered from severe depression and alcoholism, so the band fired him, after which they never put out a song half this good … and the poor guy killed himself. That worked out well for everyone. Always liked the line “the past is gone but something might be found to take its place” – I think we lost a potentially plus rock lyricist here.

157. The Verve – “Bitter Sweet Symphony.” Love the video. Can’t say I’m all that impressed by the Rolling Stones’ actions (or their lawyers’), and I say that as someone who generally defends the rights of IP holders.

156. Throwing Muses – “Bright Yellow Gun.” The most rock-infused song from a promising but generally uneven band. And I think I need a little poison.

155. Dinosaur Jr. – “Feel The Pain.” Hated it when it first came out, probably because of J. Mascis’ laconic delivery. I’m a fan now, although it took another Dinosaur Jr. song (much higher up this list) to convert me.

154. Beck – “Sexx Laws.” We have sex laws? Or maybe he really meant sexx laws, which aren’t about sex at all. I don’t really know. But this song works for me as the successful second attempt at what he was going for with “New Pollution.”

153. Pulp – “Common People.” One of the best – and wittiest – stories I’ve ever heard told in any song in any genre, about rich kids who think it’s fun to act poor. (The DC-area band emmet swimming hit on the same theme in their song “Arlington:” “they all have a motto/be rich dress poor.”)

152. Stereo MCs – “Connected.” Could have gone with “Step It Up” as well, but “Connected” has a little more of a trance or trip-hop feel, making its crossover more surprising and ultimately more important.

151. Cardigans – “My Favourite Game.” Better known for the saccharine “Lovefool,” but I prefer this straight-up rocker with its excellent use of the wah-wah pedal and Wild-at-Heart-like video.

150. Ash – “Kung Fu.” Given how many fake-punk bands broke through in the U.S., I’ve always been surprised that Ash found no success here; they were roughly contemporaries of Green Day but wrote better songs with more raw energy and less big-record-label production.

149. Radiohead – “Electioneering.” Album track from one of the three or four best discs of the ’90s.

148. Ruby – “Tiny Meat.” Minor hit on alternative radio that defies concise description. It’s new-wave minimalism, sounding like a girl, a guitar, and a DJ.

147. The KLF – “3 AM Eternal.” They’re justified … and they’re ancient. They were also wackos who deleted their entire back catalogue, so the song is permanently out of print.

146. Soul Coughing – “Casiotone Nation.” The 5% nation of lumps in my oatmeal. “Is Chicago Is Not Chicago,” from the same album, is almost as good.

145. Jesus & Mary Chain – “Head On.” I hate the Pixies cover of this.

144. Soup Dragons – “I’m Free.” Liked it more before AT&T drove it into the ground in commercials a few years ago.

143. Semisonic – “Closing Time.” First heard them via “Down in Flames,” from their debut album. I remember before their second album came out reading a business proposal from someone looking to start a record label for music aimed at middle-aged listeners. The writer made a point of arguing that Semisonic was destined to fail. I hope he found other work.

142. Alice in Chains – “I Stay Away.” I loved AiC’s acoustic stuff – they actually did some great harmonies, and the Sap EP had three really strong songs on it as well. I’ve heard the most recent album with Staley’s replacement, and they’re just not the same band.

141. Blind Melon – “Dear Ol’ Dad.” These guys were a lot more than just “No Rain,” with a sort of funk/jam band style that reminded me of the way the Red Hot Chili Peppers sounded before “Under the Bridge” – not the same hard faux-funk but the same energy and barely-contained-mess ethos.

140. Cake – “The Distance.” Unfortunately they have been re-recording this song for the last decade, and it gets worse every time.

139. Milla – “Gentlemen Who Fell.” That’s Milla Jovovich, who has had a hell of a career jumping from modeling to music to acting to fashion. This has to be one of the five weirdest songs on the list from her on-and-off falsetto to the hints of European folk music interspersed with riffs from an electric guitar.

138. Salt – “Bluster.” Worst band I have ever seen live; the singer introduced every song by saying “This is a rock song.” And it was loud. But this one’s okay.

137. Sublime – “What I Got.” I was never wild about these guys – I’ll flip the station if any of their other hits comes on – but this one was a lot tighter and used ska as an accent, as opposed to their other attempts to just be another crappy pseudo-ska band comprising white kids from the suburbs of California. (Seriously, I’m sorry that the guy is dead, but having a dead lead singer doesn’t make the music somehow better in retrospect.)

136. Blur – “Chemical World.” It’s very cheap.

135. David Gray – “Babylon.” Originally released in 1999, then re-released in 2000. Gray seems to have a cult following, but while I think he has a great, distinctive voice, this is the only song of his that I ever wanted to hear twice.

134. Alice in Chains – “Man In The Box.” Had more of an impact on me when I first heard it than it would today; at the time, it was kind of like a punch in the jaw, like an angry, sludgy dirge. And the video was creepy.

133. Oasis – “Acquiesce.” A B-side, probably the only one on this ranking. Another Oasis B-side, “Rocking Chair,” was also on the original list of about 240 songs.

132. Charlatans – “Just When You’re Thinkin’ Things Over.” One of my favorite bands of the ’90s, even though their lead singer can’t sing a lick without a producer’s help. Most of their best songs have a mournful quality to them, but this one is mostly upbeat, and there’s something rousing about the chorus’ main line, “You look good when your heart is on fire.” Doesn’t everyone?

131. Soundgarden – “Rusty Cage.” Bonus points for the Johnny Cash cover.

130. White Town – “Your Woman.” Another incredibly unlikely hit – a gay Indian-Englishman singing how he “could never be your woman.”

129. Texas – “Say What You Want.” I’m not a big adult-contemporary (or whatever they’re calling it these days) guy, but Texas’ White On Blonde album transcended that genre for me, including this song, the title track, and “Halo.”

128. Squirrel Nut Zippers – “Hell.” One of the best bands I have ever seen live, and the only band from that swing-revival period to make the list.

127. Mazzy Star – “Fade Into You.” The only other Mazzy Star song I like at all is “Rhymes of an Hour,” off the Stealing Beauty soundtrack.

126. Filter – “Hey Man, Nice Shot.” Another game-changer – I don’t think I’d ever heard a song on the radio before this one with so much screaming. But in this case, the song would have been completely forgettable without it.

125. Mercury Rev – “Young Man’s Stride.” Great overlooked band of the ’90s and early 2000s, with this, “Goddess on a Highway,” and “Delta Sun Bottleneck Stomp.” The ease with which they changed musical directions, even within a single album, always impressed me.

124. Primitive Radio Gods – “Standing Outside A Broken Phone Booth With Money In My Hand.” Granted, the song wouldn’t have been a hit without the sample.

123. Toad the Wet Sprocket – “Walk On The Ocean.” Never liked “All I Want,” which was the bigger hit; this song has more of an edge to its lyrics.

122. Propellerheads – “History Repeating.” A jazz/big beat fusion that sounds like the theme to a James Bond film with a dominating vocal performance from Dame Shirley Bassey.

121. 10,000 Maniacs – “Candy Everybody Wants.” A biting commentary on the decline of American news coverage? I suppose it’s open to interpretation, but the backing music has that trademark Maniacs melange of American styles from bluegrass to big band.

120. Helmet – “Unsung.” The most overhyped (major-label) debut album of the 1990s? Helmet weren’t pioneers, but had they come out in the late ’90s or early 2000s they might have found a better commercial response. This was the only track from them I found listenable, about as close a crossover to the mainstream as thrash ever got.

119. Sundays – “Summertime.” How did the Sundays never break out of the alternative bin in the U.S.? They made clever, sometimes beautiful pop songs, led by this cheerful jangle-pop number, but their final album, Static and Silence, failed to chart here despite “Summertime” getting some alternative radio play. Also, Harriet Wheeler was cute.

118. Peter Murphy – “Cuts You Up.” A little bloated – Murphy’s ego? – but subtle and crafty as it insinuates itself into your subconscious.

117. Danzig – “Mother 93.” I’m not much of a Danzig fan, and this song is almost a joke musically, but the tempo changes and Glenn Danzig’s threatening growl give it entertainment value.

116. Shelter – “Here It Goes.” A Krishna-punk band that never seemed to break out of the NY hardcore scene, but I swear a dozen bands that came later ripped off their sound one way or another.

115. Third Eye Blind – “Semi-Charmed Life.” I debated not including this because it’s such a cheesy pop song … but it’s a really good cheesy pop song. If you wanted to explain a “hook” to someone unfamiliar with pop music, this would be a good place to start. Also, I smile when I hear this song because it reminds me of Pat Summerall calling them “Third Blind Eye” when they played at the halftime show of an NFL game (on Thanksgiving, I think).

114. Soul Coughing – “Janine.” You might have to hear this one live to appreciate it. “Janine/I drink you up/Like you were the Baltic Sea/And I were a cup” doesn’t have the same impact in print.

113. Sponge – “Plowed.” They were kind of viewed as a knockoff of a knockoff (Stone Temple Pilots), but this is one of the better amp-up songs of the decade, and it’s better than “Molly,” their biggest hit and the song they claim had nothing to do with Molly Ringwald despite the “Sixteen candles down the drain” chorus. Sure thing, fellas.

112. Civ – “Can’t Wait One Minute More.” Speaking of NYC hardcore, Civ at least found a little mainstream play between this song (with its hilarious, no-budget video spoofing gonzo daytime talk shows) and “Secondhand Superstar.”

111. Letters to Cleo – “I See.” I’ve got a dozen or so songs on here that changed my opinions on rock or alternative music, and this is another – I’d never heard anything like Kay Hanley’s frenetic, tongue-twisting delivery on this or its follow-up, “Here and Now.” The now-defunct WBCN gave them a lot of love during my senior spring in college, when I was counting the minutes until I graduated and listened to even more music than ever.

110. Dishwalla – “Counting Blue Cars.” My opinion of the song improved when I realized the vocals were from the perspective of elementary school kids, musing about life’s big questions. I’m still convinced the band flopped because their name sucked, though. Band names matter.

109. Our Lady Peace – “Superman’s Dead.” Had four OLP songs on my original list but ended up with just one; “Starseed,” “Naveed,” and “One Man Army” were the others. “Superman’s Dead” seems, with hindsight, the peak of their energy-filled-teenaged-angst style.

108. Meat Puppets – “Backwater.” Speaking of bad band names, I bring you the Meat Puppets, and their one pop song. They rode the grunge wave and support from Kurt Cobain to a ton of MTV airplay, but this is way too clean and polished to be properly called grunge.

107. New Order – “Regret.” From 1994 till 2001, it looked like this would be New Order’s swan song – they released a few more singles from Republic, but “Regret” was a huge hit and almost seemed like a fitting way to go out. Of course, they came back with a new album (Get Ready) in 2001, and even during the hiatus bassist Peter Cook recruited a Bernard Sumner soundalike and put together the band Monaco, churning out a couple of NO-like songs in “What Do You Want from Me?” and “I’ve Got a Feeling.”

106. Smashing Pumpkins – “Rocket.” Siamese Dream was a real watershed album that ended up mistakenly lumped in with the deluge of grunge acts of the time. I didn’t think Mellon Collie was close to this good, and nothing from that double disc is on the top 150, although “Muzzle” was on the original list of 200+.

105. Rage Against the Machine – “Killing In The Name” I like this song in spite of myself.

104. Jane’s Addiction – “Been Caught Stealing.” It just hasn’t aged well, but at the time, the fact that this song got airplay on mainstream rock and even pop stations was earth-shattering. For the record, I don’t believe for a second that Perry Farrell was just trying to make art with his risque album covers. He wanted controversy, and he got it. Well done. Just don’t pretend it was about some high-minded principle instead of filthy lucre.

103. Buffalo Tom – “Torch Singer.” First heard this over some montage of snowboarding footage, a weird juxtaposition for a simple acoustic song that could easily have just been a guy and his guitar.

102. Muse – “Sunburn.” Apple was way ahead of the U.S. on Muse, using “Sunburn” in a commercial in 2000 or 2001. I think I’d take this, “Muscle Museum,” or “Cave” over almost anything they’ve put out since Showbiz, their 1999 debut album.

101. Crystal Method – “Busy Child.” I guess I didn’t know. I liked this song before the Gap khakis commercial.

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100. Stone Roses – “I Am The Resurrection.” Not exactly the fifth gospel. Seven brilliant minutes punctuated by one of the most memorable bass licks I have ever heard.

99. Pearl Jam – “Alive.” I imagine this will be a little controversial. I loved Pearl Jam’s first album before it was played to death, revived, and then played to death again for good measure. I liked the second album. I was disappointed in the third album, and I was done. I haven’t heard anything by these guys since to change my mind, and if we’re talking full albums I’d sooner listen to Temple of the Dog or Mother Love Bone, although “Alive” was a stronger single than just about anything from those two preceding acts.

98. Jesus Jones – “Right Here Right Now.” Liked it when it came out, but it has grown on me over the last twenty years, in part for its in-the-moment take on one of the biggest world events of my lifetime. “International Bright Young Thing” gets an honorable mention.

97. Chemical Brothers – “Block Rockin’ Beats.” Grabs you right from the initial call to action and (fake) bass line. The beat does, actually, rock the block.

96. Clockhammer – “Greying Out.” The most obscure song in this list, I’ll bet – it’s really just about one guitar riff, which opens the song and appears in the chorus. They weren’t edgy enough to be alternative, not grungy enough to be grungy, and not heavy enough to be metal, so they didn’t have much hope for airplay.

95. Barenaked Ladies – “The Old Apartment.” I’m not a rabid BNL fan, but liked this song and its clever lyrical twist. Plus it came out right as my wife and I moved out of our first apartment together, one we really loved but couldn’t justify paying for given how small it was.

94. Garbage – “Supervixen.” I originally thought I’d have several Garbage songs on this list – “Vow,” “Queer,” and “Only Happy When It Rains” – but when I started ranking songs this was the only one to survive the various cuts, partly because it was never overplayed (I don’t need to hear “Stupid Girl” for another nine years, at least) and partly because it was their best song when I saw them live on their first tour.

93. Depeche Mode – “It’s No Good.” DM peaked with Violator and began a steady and recently painful decline into caricature. I don’t think there was a better synth-pop band in the ’80s, since they took their new wave sound and extended it into rock and industrial territory, but once they got away from their roots, almost everything they did felt like a nerdy kid trying too hard to be tough. Be the nerd, boys.

92. Chumbawamba – “Tubthumping.” The members of this band/anarchist collective have said for years that the song is meant as a celebrating of the working (and drinking) man, but I have always suspected there was an element of irony or maybe outright parody in it, since it doesn’t exactly paint the greatest picture of Joe Working Class.

91. Charlatans – “Sproston Green.” The closer from their debut album and the closer in every concert they’ve given since. I have no idea what this song is about, but I have always found the music intoxicating, one of the best tracks of the short-lived “Madchester” movement. The Charlatans, for what little it’s worth, were one of my first-ever successful prospect calls, as I wrote a short review for a school paper forecasting a great career from them, one I think they made good on for about a decade.

90. Suede – “Metal Mickey.” I know I’ve probably beaten the joke into the ground, but this should be Brett Anderson’s intro music. It’s aggressive, raw, and unpolished, so it didn’t go far in the U.S., but there’s something invigorating about a grinding rock song that hasn’t been produced into bland, radio-friendly submission.

89. Blur – “Song 2.” It’s a little bit of a shame that this is the song for which Blur will forever be known, since it’s hardly representative of their music – but it’s brilliant and the perfect length for a song of its ilk.

88. Oasis – “Some Might Say.” Not so much Britpop as Brit-arena-rock. I love that Oasis was so unapologetic about making big, loud guitar-driven songs made to be played outdoors in front of 20,000 raucous fans.

87. Nirvana – “Lounge Act.” The best album of the ’90s, for my money, although it’s hard to pick a second standout track after the obvious one. “Lounge Act” always grabbed me because the meter has you slightly unbalanced for the entire song, and the more obvious choices, like “Lithium” and “Come As You Are,” have been played to death since the album’s release.

86. Soul Asylum – “Spinnin’.” Not quite as good as their late-80s masterpiece “Sometime To Return,” but it maintains that same frenetic pace and self-doubting lyrics.

85. Black Grape – “Yeah Yeah Brother.” I was never huge on the Happy Mondays – not even the “Come Together” ripoff “Step On” – but this insidious dance track sounded to me like the collision of pop and anti-pop in the sky over an all-night rave.

84. Space – “Neighbourhood.” Mister Rogers’, it ain’t.

83. Jars of Clay – “Flood.” Unbeatable harmonies and a lot of energy for what is fundamentally a Christian folk song.

82. James – “Just Like Fred Astaire.” I’m not wild about most love songs – the very term calls to mind cliches and boring music – but this track avoided both issues, and as a Fred Astaire fan I appreciate the simile at the heart of the song.

81. Spacehog – “In The Meantime.” It’s that one guitar lick during the chorus, isn’t it? I mean, without that, this song doesn’t get a quarter of the airplay it did.

80. Longpigs – “Blue Skies.” If and when I have a regular podcast or even radio show, this will be my intro music. The first thirty seconds or so feel like a delta-blues stomp, and during their brief career Longpigs were usually good for a clever line or two (“If there were no gods at all/I know I’d probably fear them still”).

79. Tasmin Archer – “Sleeping Satellite.” Talk about one-hit wonders. I’ve never heard another song quite like this one, although I did think at the time that Des’ree stole her thunder with that “Gotta Be” garbage – it was like “Sleeping Satellite” dumbed down for the masses.

78. Eels – “Novocaine For The Soul.” Jesus and his lawyer/are coming back.

77. Travis – “Why Does It Always Rain On Me?” I thought this song was stupid when I first heard it, until I thought about the lyrics – Travis was never much for intelligent lyrics, but the core lament about the nature of luck in life is a profound one, although I’d probably lay even money that they didn’t intend it as such.

76. An Emotional Fish – “Celebrate.” A forgotten modern-rock classic that probably came about four or five years too soon. It got a lot of airplay in Boston because the band was Irish. Well, that and the fact that the song is catchy.

75. Beck – “Loser.” I actually like Beck, but it’s more that I generally like his music than a fondness for a particular song or two. He’s ridiculously clever and inventive; I’m not sure there are five better lyricists working in the realm of popular music right now, and this song had some outstanding wordplay. Jason Mraz is just a pretender to this throne.

74. Radiohead – “High And Dry.” The Bends gets better every time I listen to it. A song that would be the high point in many rock bands’ careers is maybe the third- or fourth-best track on Radiohead’s second-best album.

73. James – “Laid.” Somehow this song avoided me until after its run on the charts was over. Fun one to play on the guitar with a bunch of friends to sing along, generally when we’d all had a little too much to drink.

72. Oasis – “Wonderwall.” Much as Blur shouldn’t be remembered just for “Song 2,” Oasis shouldn’t just be remembered for this half love-song/half-lament/full homage to George Harrison. But it is a great song.

71. Alice in Chains – “Would?” I think posterity will be – or is already – unkind to Alice in Chains, consigining them somewhat to the grunge dustbin, and their new incarnation as a generic aggro-metal band won’t help matters. They were boundary-pushers in their brief heyday, and they were grunge more for reasons of geography than legitimate musical similarities.

70. Animals that Swim – “Faded Glamour.” I’ve never heard a better song about the decay of an old city. Underrated band even within the U.K., and almost completely unknown here, since their sound was so British and almost cheerfully dated.

69. Soundgarden – “Spoonman.” A guilty pleasure. Just move on.

68. Cracker – “Teen Angst (What The World Needs Now).” Very few rock songs make me laugh the first time I hear them; this is one of a handful that made me laugh the second time. “Another folk singer” is a great code phrase to use with people who know the song.

67. K’s Choice – “Not An Addict.” Memorable enough that fifteen years later, my wife and I can hum the intro to each other (like when I see her playing Farmville) and get the entire message across. This song always reminded me of an obscure track from about two years prior by Fledgling called “Solomon’s Crown.”

66. Trash Can Sinatras – “Hayfever.” I discovered this song and band because of Beavis and Butthead. I still have a hard time with that.

65. Drugstore – “El President.” The story goes that the lead singer of Drugstore didn’t want the job because she didn’t like her voice. I can’t imagine a larynx better suited to singing rock songs than hers. Guest vocal by Thom Yorke – he got around a bit, including a star turn on P.J. Harvey’s “This Mess We’re In” – puts it over the top, although I imagine the Secret Service wasn’t a fan.

64. Matthew Sweet – “Girlfriend.” One of the best power-pop songs of all time. Two good guitar solos, too.

63. Eels – “Last Stop: This Town.” When Eels were good, they combined strong melodies with unusual arrangements, so you’d always get something unexpected like the two-octave drop for one line in the chorus. Excellent video.

62. For Squirrels – “8:02 PM.” They had one minor hit with “Mighty K.C.,” a half-baked tribute to Kurt Cobain that came after their own lead singer and manager were killed when their bus crashed during a tour. Their debut album had a lot of promise, led by this nervous, fast-paced rock track.

61. Ian Brown – “Set My Baby Free.” Who knew that Brown was such an essential part of the Stone Roses’ genius? It would make the list just for the main lyric in the chorus, “Hey, you ugly people/I want you to set my baby free.”

60. 10,000 Maniacs – “These Are Days.” I’m not a fan of any of their work except for their final album, when they turned in a poppier direction.

59. Soul Asylum – “Black Gold.” Sort of the transition song from classic, frenetic Soul Asylum to folky crap like “Runaway Train” that sent their indie-rock cred boat on to the rocks. It seems like tons of bands have songs like this, one great song that veers from their standard sound and leads them in a more commercial direction, after which they’re unlistenable. Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” is the canonical example for me, but “Black Gold” is probably a better example for my taste in music – a song I loved that marks the end of my fandom of a great band.

58. Depeche Mode – “Enjoy The Silence.” It’s easy to take this song at face value as another synth-pop song along the lines of “Just Can’t Get Enough,” but there’s a gothic/industrial undercurrent to this song, which sounds like a lost B-side from 1983 recorded by Evil Depeche Mode.

57. Soul Coughing – “Circles.” Doughty refers to this as “the hit” when he plays it in solo concerts, and it was probably the closest thing to a pop song they ever recorded – and the highest-charting- but it’s certainly not my favorite SC song and you could argue it’s not even the best song on El Oso.

56. Blur – “There’s No Other Way.” I love Albarn’s laconic singing style and the slightly off-kilter drumbeat, and the fact that it’s underproduced – the whole thing sounds like it was recorded in a swimming pool – just adds to its psychedelic feel. Or something.

55. Better than Ezra – “Good.” They peaked with their first song, but at least it was a memorable one, among a handful on this list that put me back to a specific time and place. Great chorus with a brief but somewhat potent story in the lyrics.

54. Smashing Pumpkins – “Cherub Rock.” They had a great run for four albums, but nothing quite matched this song’s combination of intensity and sludge for me, like grunge but distinct enough that they couldn’t be lumped into the Seattle scene. The words never made a lick of sense to me, though.

53. Marcy Playground – “Sex And Candy.” So I had this song on a compilation CD a year before it became an alternative-radio hit, and only discovered it after hearing the song on whatever that crappy faux-alternative station was when we lived in Pittsburgh. (I remember that they only played the version of Sugar Ray’s “Fly” that didn’t have Super Cat’s added vocals, and it annoyed my face off.) “Sex and Candy” has to be one of the greatest one-hit wonder hits ever, and the whole thing sounds like it took 20 minutes to write and an hour to record, tops. But it’s a less-is-more classic, like they put all their good ideas into one song and could have called it a day afterwards.

52. Oasis – “Supersonic.” Sneering and unapologetic, masculine rock. I love the fact that sixteen years on they’re still making the same music. I hate the fact that they seem to have run out of hooks. This track was a smack upside the head at a time when grunge had played itself out and we needed a fresh wave of guitar-based rock.

51. Charlatans – “Tellin’ Stories.” The decision to omit this from their first greatest hits package defied any and all explanation. The long cold open builds up this tremendous tension that never quite dissipates before the song ends.

50. Alice in Chains – “No Excuses.” It’s funny that Alice in Chains did so much great acoustic work – this, “I Stay Away,” the Sap EP – yet their Unplugged show was joyless and perfunctory. The three-part harmonies here are a revelation from a band known for sludgy, bummed-out rock.

49. Handsome Boy Modeling School – “Rock N’ Roll (Could Never Hip Hop Like This).” Prince Paul and Dan the Automator? Sign me up. This track, built around a sample from a young LL Cool J (or someone who sounds a hell of a lot like him), is now my ringtone.

48. Squirrel Nut Zippers – “Put A Lid On It.” Save it for another night. The swing craze didn’t last – and frankly Swingers wasn’t good enough to survive a second viewing – but this is one of a small number of songs from that brief revival that still sounds great today, instead of like a money-grab anachronism.

47. Jesus & Mary Chain with Hope Sandoval – “Sometimes Always.” Not the typical J&MC track, and I’m not sure it really had to be Hope Sandoval, but the combination works as a fake ballad with an ironic lyrical twist.

46. Drugstore – “Spacegirl.” Isabel Monteiro, the Brazilian lead singer of this British band, has an unmistakeable smoky voice, almost a baritone, that could turn the phone book into riveting lyrics.

45. The Primitives – “Crash – the ’95 Mix.” I’m cheating here, since the original “Crash” was released in 1988, but 1) I didn’t hear the song until the remix/re-release and 2) the remix/re-release was better. Plus, it’s my list, and I can do what I want. “Sick of It” was probably their other main college-radio hit, but for me “Secrets” is just a shade behind “Crash” for best Primitives song.

44. Morrissey – “The More You Ignore Me, The Closer I Get.” Beware/I bear more grudges/Than lonely high-court judges. Sung with a smirk, as most Morrissey songs should be.

43. Sugar – “If I Can’t Change Your Mind.” A near-perfect acoustic power-pop song. Bob Mould’s ear for melody poked through from time to time with Hüsker Dü, but it shone once he shifted to more radio-friendly fare, both in his solo work (“See a Little Light”) and with Sugar (“Your Favorite Thing,” “Helpless,” and this track).

42. U2 – “Until The End Of The World.” This song has a dark, desolate quality I had never heard before in a U2 rocker, which turned out to be true of much of the Achtung Baby disc, almost as if they took the success of “With or Without You” as a clue that they should add that layer of complexity to all of their songs.

41. Sneaker Pimps – “Six Underground.” Trip-hop never did much for me, but the more traditional song structure and the sultry vocals made this more of a trip-pop song. Without Kelli Ali, the Pimps haven’t done much, although I did like their 2002 single “Sick.”

40. Mother Love Bone – “Crown Of Thorns.” I wore out their only full-length CD, Apple, for at least a full year after it came out, but in the last ten years have barely gone back to it. (MLB’s lead singer, Andrew Wood, died of a heroin overdose before the album came out; he was the subject of the Temple of the Dog song “Say Hello 2 Heaven,” and Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament of MLB went on to found Pearl Jam.) The great loss with Wood was his poetic lyrics, as he used more concrete imagery in the average song than you’ll find on a typical top 10 album.

39. Catherine Wheel – “Waydown.” Profiled this one in my ten forgotten songs post from last spring.

38. Stone Temple Pilots – “Trippin’ On A Hole In A Paper Heart.” As good as the song is, it also seemed a little rock-by-numbers even at the time. It’s built on a great riff – a tremendous riff – but there’s not much to back it up.

37. The Verve – “Lucky Man.” You know, the great Verve song they actually wrote all by themselves.

36. Ash – “Girl From Mars.” Catchy punk-pop with clever lyrics, and they were just 19 when the album came out. These guys put Green Day in their back pockets.

35. U2 – “Mysterious Ways.” This video always cracked me up, as it consists largely of Bono preening for the camera.

34. Dandy Warhols – “Not If You Were The Last Junkie On Earth.” My introduction to the Dandys’ brand of snarky indie rock, well before they got all polished and produced. How could you not like a song with “Heroin is so passé” as its refrain?

33. Prince – “Sexy M.F..” Prince’s 1990s output paled compared to what he produced in the 1980s, but this funk masterpiece harkened back to his earliest work but with more polish and unplayable lyrics.

32. Soul Asylum – “Somebody To Shove.” A last gasp for their original post-punk/garage sound before they morphed into a radio-friendly country-rock act.

31. Ozomatli – “Cut Chemist Suite.” Guest vocals by Chali 2Na from Jurassic 5 and guest scratching by Cut Chemist elevate this over Ozomatli’s typical jazz/funk/Latin hybrids.

30. Manic Street Preachers – “If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next.” I can’t say I ever agreed much with their politics, and often their rhetoric outshone their fairly straight-ahead Brit-rock, but this atmospheric lament retains some of the energy on their less focused polemics. If you’re not familiar with MSP, their non-musical claim to fame is that their main lyricist, Richey James Edwards, disappeared in 1995 and was eventually presumed dead after a long battle with depression and anorexia; he’s is probably most remembered in Britain for carving the letters “4 REAL” into his arm during a live televised interview.

29. Faith No More – “Midlife Crisis.” These guys were doomed after “Epic,” a one-off joke song from the otherwise strong hard-rock album The Real Thing, became a crossover hit, even though the disc featured some far better songs like “From Out of Nowhere,” “Falling to Pieces,” or the title track. The follow-up disc, Angel Dust, was uneven, but included two standout tracks that should have had commercial appeal, but the market wanted another “Epic” and FNM, to their credit, didn’t give them one.

28. Moloko – “Fun For Me.” I’ll quote myself: I first heard this on WFNX in 1997 when it was playing as my alarm went off one morning, and despite not hearing it again for years, I remembered enough of the lyrics to track it down during what one might call the Napster era. It sticks in your head like treacle – and I know it’s not just my head, because everyone for whom I’ve played this song hasn’t just loved it, but become a little obsessed with it, regardless of what type(s) of music they typically liked.

27. Stone Temple Pilots – “Interstate Love Song.” Purple was STP’s deepest album, where “Big Empty,” one of their biggest radio hits, was maybe the sixth-best song.

26. These Animal Men – “Sharp Kid.” These Animal Men melded new wave and post-punk with makeup and glam-rock tales of drugs and debauchery, and were promptly swept aside by the more muscular rock of Oasis. Good luck getting the shouted “ba-ba-da” line out of your head; it’s been in mine for a decade.

25. Soundgarden – “Fell On Black Days.” They deviated from their hard-rock roots on the Superunknown album, but as good as “Big Dumb Sex” was, I can at least understand their desire to evolve musically, and for two albums the results were pretty solid. The one disappointment on this and the follow-up album was Chris Cornell’s lyrics, which took a step back even as their sound continued to advance; this was the one song on Superunknown where I saw glimpses of the writing Cornell showed on Badmotorfinger.

24. Oasis – “D’You Know What I Mean?.” Aside from the song’s length, I don’t see a reason why this wasn’t a bigger hit here. If the market was looking at Oasis for another “Wonderwall” or “Champagne Supernova,” they completely misread what the band was all about and obviously hadn’t listened to much of the album from which those songs came. “D’You Know…” is a huge, bombastic, balls-out, driving rocker, seven minutes of testosterone wrapped in guitars.

23. Prince – “Pope.” You can be the President/I’d rather be the Pope. Seems more true now than when he wrote the lyrics, doesn’t it?

22. Depeche Mode – “Policy Of Truth.” Not my favorite Mode song – that would be “Never Let Me Down Again” – but it’s second. There’s a creepy, gothic quality to this that marked much of their best post-Vince-Clarke material.

21. Charlatans – “The Only One I Know.” The opener to a solid album and a great career, this Madchester anthem is a throwback to the psychedelic rock of the late 1960s, complete with Hammond organ.

20. School of Fish – “3 Strange Days.” One of the great unrealized careers of 1990s rock was that of School of Fish and their lead singer, Josh Clayton-Felt, who died of testicular cancer at age 33 less than nine years after this song became an alternative-radio hit. School of Fish’s second CD, Human Cannonball, was a better overall disc than the first, but didn’t have a breakout hit like this track (although “Take Me Anywhere” and “Kerosene” were favorites of mine), and the band broke up shortly thereafter. Clayton-Felt may have had some great music left in him, but he was dead within six weeks of the diagnosis. So listen to this song, and make sure you check your boys often.

19. Ned’s Atomic Dustbin – “Grey Cell Green.” I remain convinced that using the word “dustbin” in their names helped sink Ned’s chances of commercial success in the U.S., in part because I find it hard to believe this song didn’t cross over for at least a little airplay on mainstream rock stations. This song and “Kill Your Televison” presaged a lot of the harder side of Britpop and its descendents, including Oasis, Radiohead, and Muse.

18. U2 – “One.” Although I never really needed to see these guys in drag.

17. Stone Temple Pilots – “Big Bang Baby.” It was almost like someone dared STP to write a pop song, and Weiland covered it with the same lament about fame and success that filled much of the Tiny Music disc. This was sort of the end of their most fertile period of songwriting – they had a few strong singles afterwards, but the writing became as uneven as Weiland himself was.

16. Radiohead – “Just.” The song that made me a Radiohead fan, and a sound I think Muse has been emulating for a decade now. One of the funniest comments I saw on the old Baseball Primer was from Dan Szymborski, who said that the whispered secret in the video for “Just” was (I’m paraphrasing) “pitchers have little to no control over the results of balls in play.”

15. Mansun – “Wide Open Space.” The only Mansun song to receive any airplay in the U.S., although their debut album, Attack Of The Grey Lantern, is strong, with a half-dozen other songs worth your time; I always thought President Bush should have used the opener, “The Chad Who Loved Me,” at his 2001 inauguration.

14. Dinosaur Jr. – “Start Choppin’.” If there’s a better adjective for the guitar in this song than “crunchy,” I’d like to hear it. This song actually hit the top 20 on the U.K. Pop singles chart, which is another sign that the Brits are more highly musically evolved than we are.

13. Faith No More – “A Small Victory.” About as melodic as FNM ever got, almost poppy, but lead singer Mike Patton managed to slip a little growl or two in there.

12. Portishead – “Sour Times.” Also known as “Theme to a Nonexistent Spy Film.”

11. Butthole Surfers – “Who Was In My Room Last Night?” If you know the Surfers at all, it’s probably because of alternative-radio hit “Pepper,” or perhaps from Gibby Haynes’ guest spot on Ministry’s “Jesus Built My Hotrod,” but this is by far their best track, the best song ever written about a bad dream, with a guitar riff that could have come from Tony Iommi’s best work with Black Sabbath.

10. Radiohead – “Fake Plastic Trees.” Another song that grew on me the more I heard it. Thom Yorke’s vocals – plaintive, even whining – and the added layers of sound behind the final verse elevate it beyond your standard acoustic-number-by-rock-band tune.

9. Prince – “Gett Off.” Prince was much, much funkier when he sang about sex rather than about how funky he was.

8. Stone Temple Pilots – “Plush.” Memorable for two reasons beyond its status as a great grunge song: its meaningless (or so I believe) lyrics, and that one chord that every guitar player couldn’t quite figure out. It’s also the rare song that worked just as well in an acoustic version as it did in its original plugged-in version.

7. Screaming Trees – “Nearly Lost You.” The grunge revolution on pop radio skipped the Trees despite this radio-friendly gem, which also appeared on the Singles soundtrack, a must-own at the time for any college student into alternative or grunge. I saw the Trees twice in concert, and despite the fact that neither guitarist was much to write home about technically, they gave a great show, with drummer Barrett Martin playing with what seemed like six arms.

6. Stone Roses – “Love Spreads.” My ring tone for years was the intro to this song, a blues-rock song with heavy use of the slide that owed a debt to Jimmy Page and yet was unmistakeably Roses. Odd fact: The Stone Roses’ original record label, Silvertone, was owned by Zomba Records, best known as the home of boy bands N*Sync and the Backstreet Boys a few years after the Roses bolted for Geffen.

5. Soul Coughing – “Super Bon Bon.” Move aside/And let the man go through. Homicide: Life on the Street used a long chunk of this song in the intro sequence to one of its best episodes, over a scene where the detectives raided a chop shop, something that remains, for me, among the best uses ever of a current song in a television program.

4. Pigeonhed featuring the Lo-Fidelity All-Stars – “Battleflag.” Quoting myself again: I first heard this during my summer in Seattle in 1998 while pulling into the parking lot of the Safeway on Queen Anne Ave., and I sat in the car until the damn thing was over because I was riveted to the seat. Rock meets electronica meets funk with a vocalist doing his best homage to Prince.

3. Beth Orton – “Stolen Car.” Nothing against Dido, but the reason she was successful in the U.S. while her contemporary Orton was not was her looks. Orton wrote better lyrics and better music, capped off by this sinuous, haunting slow-rocker whose words aim at shifting targets.

2. Radiohead – “Paranoid Android.” I once saw a reference to this song as the strangest single to ever hit the British Top 10. I can’t think of a mainstream rock song this musically complex other than the faux-operetta “Bohemian Rhapsody,” forever ruined as serious music by Wayne’s World. Let’s hope no similar fate awaits Radiohead’s masterpiece.

1. Nirvana – “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” The song and album that redefined rock music, destroying one entire movement (hair metal), ushering in a new one (grunge), inspiring countless singers and lyricists, and keeping alive the punk/post-punk ethic for at least a few more years.

Forgotten songs, part one.

This may or may not be a recurring feature here: songs I really like and never stopped liking but that, for one reason or another, were never huge hits in their times and have since been gathering dust on the music world’s shelves. I haven’t listed anything too obscure – I think everything here received radio airplay in the U.S. – and most are available for download via amazon.com. I started out with a list of over twenty candidates but pared it down to something more manageable. If you’ve got a forgotten classic of your own to nominate, throw it in the comments alongside your adulation of these tracks.

Love Spit Love – “Am I Wrong” (video)

I hated the Psychedelic Furs while they were peaking – I think it was because the name was too weird; my music preferences during childhood were often predicated on ridiculous things like that – only to discover afterwards that they produced some pretty amazing stuff. Half the band re-formed as Love Spit Love, who had a minor hit with this atmospheric, melancholy ballad. They’re probably better known now for their cover of the Smiths’ “How Soon is Now,” which became the theme song for the TV show Charmed, but that’s a perfunctory money-grab compared to “Am I Wrong.”

Moloko – “Fun For Me” (video)

I first heard this on WFNX in 1997 when it was playing as my alarm went off one morning, and despite not hearing it again for years, I remembered enough of the lyrics to track it down during what one might call the Napster era. It sticks in your head like treacle – and I know it’s not just my head, because everyone for whom I’ve played this song hasn’t just loved it, but become a little obsessed with it, regardless of what type(s) of music they typically liked. Which makes some sense, since I’m not sure how you could assign any genre to “Fun for Me.” But perhaps that’s why it never become any sort of hit in the U.S., given our tendency toward narrowcasting even on mainstream radio stations.

Pigeonhed feat. Lo Fidelity All-Stars – “Battleflag” (video)

I first heard this during my summer in Seattle in 1998 while pulling into the parking lot of the Safeway on Queen Anne Ave., and I sat in the car until the damn thing was over because I was riveted to the seat. It’s sort of like Prince meets … well, some other side of Prince, yet the end product doesn’t really sound that much like Prince but more like something by a couple of guys who really like Prince but also like overdubs and drum/bass samples and that ubiquitous handclap. There are a couple of versions around, but the best remix is the one found on MTV’s AMP 2.

Susanna Hoffs – “All I Want” (video)

Susanna Hoffs turned 50 in January, which I find horrifying, since I doubt I had a bigger crush on any celebrity during my formative years. I’m pleased, however, to discover that she still looks damn good. Hoffs released two solo albums in the 1990s between the Bangles’ breakup and inevitable reunion, neither of which did much on the charts, but her second effort included a fantastic cover of the Lightning Seeds’ “All I Want,” taking out the twee and turning into more of a folk-rock song. Sadly, the album is out of print and isn’t available for download. (Why wouldn’t a record label just push all of its songs out as mp3s? Is there some hidden cost of which I’m unaware? I imagine it would just be free revenue every time a song sells. And why post the video on Youtube if you don’t intend to sell the song?)

Pete Rock & C.L. Smooth – “They Reminisce Over You” (video)

As far as I’m concerned, the Bad Boy era killed hip-hop after an incredibly prolific decade of high-quality hip-hop songs, from the Golden Age of Rap coming out of New York to the short-lived jazz-rap movement (Digable Planets, anyone?) to southern California G-Funk in the early ’90s. (Warren G doesn’t qualify, sorry.) Producer Pete Rock was part of the jazz-rap movement, sticking with jazz and jazzy samples and lots of horn solos behind the, uh, smooth rhymes of C.L. Smooth. “T.R.O.Y.,” named as an homage to the late Troy Dixon of Heavy D and the Boyz, was easily their finest moment, built on a bass/horn riff from jazz saxophonist Tom Scott with fluid lyrics from C.L. Smooth.

Stone Roses – “Love Spreads” (video)

The opening 30 seconds constitute my main ring tone. If you like great guitar riffs, the entire album from which “Love Spreads” comes (Second Coming) will be right up your alley; guitarist John Squire wrote some enormous hooks and fills just about every available space with memorable licks. I still have no idea why this song, the first single from Second Coming, wasn’t at least a huge hit on “mainstream rock” stations, given the big guitar sounds and the catchy ad-infinitum chorus at the end. Also recommended: The Stone Roses’ guitarist’s post-breakup project, Seahorses, recorded one incredible song called “Love is the Law” (video) featuring awesome guitar work and the priceless line “Strap-on Sally/Chased us down the alley/We feared for our behinds.” Incidentally, the Stone Roses are going on tour this summer after more than a decade of “when hell freezes over” responses to reunion rumors.

Mansun – “Wide Open Space” (video – live version)

“Wide Open Spaces” garnered some modern-rock and mainstream-rock radio play when the album came out in 1996, but nothing else from the album broke through and their follow-up work wasn’t very good at all. (Incidentally, the album’s opening track, “The Chad Who Loved Me,” should have been all over the place in the fall of 2000, right?) There’s a lot of ’70s epic/arena rock to this song, but with this great underlying tension from that repeated two-note guitar riff. “Wide Open Spaces” would also rate highly on my list of “Songs I wish I had the range to sing.” Even solo, in the car, it’s a stretch.

Monster Magnet – “Negasonic Teenage Warhead” (video)

I know, they were completely ridiculous, a pastiche of stoner rock, New Wave of British Heavy Metal, and even a little bit of glam thrown in, but before the bombastic (if catchy) “Space Lord,” Monster Magnet threw down this straight-out rocker that will have you shouting “I will deny you!” for days. I wonder how much singer/songwriter Dave Wyndorf thinks he owes to Guns N Roses or White Zombie. It’s one of sleaze rock’s finest hours – or four-and-a-half minutes.

Catherine Wheel – “Waydown” (video)

This song wasn’t a great example of the Catherine Wheel’s music – “Black Metallic” and “Heal 2” are probably their signature songs – but it’s easily my favorite song by the group, still bringing that faint My Bloody Valentine influence to a much more polished finished product. The music is all energy and tension even as the lyrics describe a rapid, willful descent. It wasn’t quite grunge enough for its era but was harder and heavier than the hair-metal that grunge replaced.

Peter Murphy – “Cuts You Up” (video)

Murphy was the lead singer of the goth/arthouse band Bauhaus, which spawned the better-known Love and Rockets after its breakup. While “Cuts You Up” didn’t reach the commercial heights of L&R’s “So Alive,” it’s a seductive hook-laden Roxy Music-esque track that’s almost too sophisticated for its own commercial ambitions. Murphy tried to recreate the formula with “The Sweetest Drop” on his next album, but missed the mark somewhat painfully.

Say Trickle – “It Doesn’t Count” (video)

I know I promised nothing too obscure, but I’m making an exception to my own rule for this little-known British pop/rock band that sort of got caught between the Madchester craze in the early ’90s and the Britpop revival of a few years later. If they had a hit, this was it, although it just scraped the lower reaches of the modern rock charts and didn’t chart at all on Billboard‘s Hot 100. Unfortunately, Say Trickle’s only record is long out of print, but at least the video survives on Youtube.