24. Everclear, Sparkle and Fade When I was at the height of my imperious, combative, disgruntled twenties, my contrarian streak could lead me to come dubious judgments, at least where new music was concerned. For example, while there’s some haziness around this memory (many of my most spirited music debates took place in the wee hours of beer-soaked evenings), I expended some of my taste capital announcing to whoever had the misfortune to be across the table that Everclear was one of the more underrated bands on the day and their 1995 release, Sparkle and Fade, deserved prominent mention in … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1995, 24 and 23

27. Smoking Popes, Born to Quit Smoking Popes hailed from the ‘burbs of Chicago and played exactly the sort of brash, punk-punched pop music that was necessary to get noticed in that noisy, busy city. Born to Quit was the band’s sophomore album, released initially on the local ultra-indie Johann’s Face Records before being picked up and reissued by Capitol Records, effectively making it their major label debut (though it would be entirely reasonable to affix that descriptor to their follow-up, 1997’s Destination Failure, which was actually recorded for Capitol and lived down to its title as it was a … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1995, 27 – 25

30. Bush, Sixteen Stone A few year backs, when I called a different online space my digital home, I spent an entire day watching Michael Bay films and chronicling the experience for anyone who cared to read. I’d sworn off the efforts of the director following the appalling Armageddon, and decided, for reasons that escape me now, to watch everything I’d missed, in chronological order, across one morning and afternoon, culminating with an evening viewing of Transformers. I tried reading a book afterward and couldn’t do it. That’s how bad the endless march of terrible filmmaking scrambled my brain. While recently … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1995, 30 – 28

32. Love Battery, Straight Freak Ticket It often seemed that playing grunge music and being from Seattle basically combined up to create a golden ticket for qualifying bands in the early-to-mid-nineties, but the crossover success wasn’t uniformly distributed. Love Battery had the right sound and the correct zip code. What they didn’t have was a label that knew how to market them. Straight Freak Ticket was the band’s fourth album overall and their first full-length since jumping from Sub Pop Records to Atlas Records. It obviously did pretty well with at least one batch of college kids. As far as I can … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1995, 32 and 31