Long before The Chronic dropped in ’92, Dr. Dre exploded onto the scene in 1988 as part of the legendary gangsta rap group N.W.A, handling the production duties on their seminal LP Straight Outta Compton. It’s one of the most influential rap albums ever (and an...
Zeppelin’s career can be pretty cleanly divided in half since they made eight studio albums, the first four of which were released between January 1969 and November 1971 and were stylishly titled Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin II, Led Zeppelin III and Led Zeppelin IV. It...
I still remember when I first heard the White Stripes’ “Fell in Love with a Girl” on the radio in the spring of 2002. I was sitting alone in the car for some reason, and the song pulverized the car speakers for its all-too-brief one-minute-and-fifty-second length. I...
Nine Inch Nails has always played an interesting role in the alternative revolution. The golden age of grunge existed between the deaths of Mother Love Bone’s Andrew Wood (March 19, 1990) and Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain (April 5, 1994 — though his body wasn’t found until...
This album absolutely dominated my sophomore year of college. Before that, I was just a casual fan of the Foo Fighters — I had heard their singles countless times on alternative rock radio. I thought they were cool but I didn’t really identify with them. You see, I...
This will come as a surprise to those who don’t know me personally, but Incubus is my favorite band, and though other Incubus fans will probably disagree with me on this, I really do believe A Crow Left of the Murder… is their most expressive work. I grew up listening...
Soul, as you may have noticed, is a bit of a weak spot for me, but in my defense, it’s not entirely my fault. For one thing, the soul music industry was all about singles, so not that many albums, let alone great albums, were even made in the first place. Motown...
Released on the same day (December 11, 1970) as Yoko Ono’s similarly titled Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band, John Lennon’s post-Beatles debut John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band absolutely obliterates everything the Beatles were. The matching suits, the mop top hair cuts, even the...
I’ll just come right out and say it: Hunky Dory isn’t just good, it’s astonishingly good. It has the feel of a lost Beatles record; at the very least it could have fit as the fifth and sixth sides of The White Album if it had another disc. Released a year after the...
Radiohead’s most famous song is 1992’s “Creep,” which has become one of the definitive alternative rock songs over the past twenty years. (You can still hear it on alternative rock radio pretty frequently.) Yet the album that houses “Creep,” Pablo Honey, is easily...