1. Marques Bovre and the Evil Twins, Flyover Land Though I wasn’t at the station at the time, I can provide all sorts of reasons as to why Flyover Land predictably landed at the top spot of 90FM’s year-end chart. The simplest explanation involves the radio station’s biggest event of the year. A weekend-long affair modestly billed as The World’s Largest Trivia Contact takes place every April. Throughout much of the nineteen-nineties the weekend prior was marked by a couple of “Kickoff” programs: a midnight movie and a concert. In 1995, the movie was an indie crowdpleaser that likely challenges the sensibilities … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1995, 1

2. Goo Goo Dolls, A Boy Named Goo There are a lot of albums on this particular countdown that sound intensely, almost painfully tied to their era. I tend to consider the different records that are so desperately trying to ape the Seattle sound as the most characteristic of the time. They contributed mightily to the numbing sameness of the commercial alternative stations that briefly flared up, including the one I worked at all through 1995. I think I may be a little off-base with that theory, though. Listening to it anew, I’m now convinced that A Boy Named Goo … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1995, 2

4. Radiohead, The Bends In 1995, Radiohead wasn’t yet Radiohead. Yes, it was absolutely comprised of the exact same five members who persist in the lineup to this day, and any cursory listen to their earliest albums indicates that they were already engaged in some of the same sonic explorations that would define them in years to come, although it was definitely in a nascent version. That noted, the band wasn’t yet burdened by the stultifying reputation for modern pop distilled down to high art that began a couple years later, with 1997’s excellent OK Computer, and proceeded with a … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1995, 4

5. Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, Brainbloodvolume As happens from time to time in this crazy endeavor of mine, I find myself downright startled by the high placement of an album on the chart being scaled through. The U.K. band Ned’s Atomic Dustbin had a couple of enormous hits on 90Fm during my time there. The band released their debut album, God Fodder, in 1991, and the singles “Kill Your Television” and “Grey Cell Green” were as constant of a presence on our Central Wisconsin airwaves as station policy would allow. Their follow-up, Are You Normal?, also did well, though I don’t recall … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1995, 5

6. Juliana Hatfield, Only Everything I don’t think I was the only person at 90FM who actively cultivated celebrity crushes. At the risk of stating the obvious, boys are sorta gross when it comes to that, categorizing those to whom they’re attracted as objects of various degrees of desire in an effort to make sense of, well, mostly their own loneliness. Among my brethren, at least there was a little different set of criteria that guided our fetishizing appraisal of the singers and musicians that captured a shard or two of our desperate, addled hearts. For those of us who favored women, … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1995, 6

7. Matthew Sweet, 100% Fun Matthew Sweet was probably alternative rock’s official King of Power Pop in 1995, not that there were many combatants for that particular throne. Sweet bounded from obscurity to the upper reaches of the college charts a few years earlier, upon the release of his brilliant 1991 album, Girlfriend. With a big guitar sound and deliriously catchy hooks, Sweet scratched an itch most college programmers (myself included) didn’t even know they had, sending legs thumping as joyously as that of a dog whose human pal has found just the right spot behind the ear. This underserved subsection of the … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1995, 7

8. Garbage, Garbage I’m pleased that I sit in Madison, Wisconsin as I write this post. Seattle was the epicenter of the explosion of grunge rock that shifted, defined, and to a large degree eventually decimated college rock in the early-to-mid-nineteen-nineties, but the state capital of Wisconsin is connected to a murky asterisk in any geographic history of that shifting music scene. Madisonian Butch Vig had been in a few small, locally notable bands, Spooner and Fire Town among them. More importantly, as it turned out, Vig partnered with Steve Marker to open Smart Studios, a recording facility housed in … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1995, 8

9. PJ Harvey, To Bring You My Love Technically, To Bring You My Love is a debut album. Specifically, it’s a solo debut. While it’s the third studio album to bear the name PJ Harvey (and fourth overall, if the self-explanatory 1993 release 4-Track Demos is included in the tally), both Dry and Rid of Me were officially the work of a trio that shared a name with their lead singer and driving creative force. While touring to support Rid of Me, the band began to splinter, and Harvey decided to dissolve the group and effectively reclaim her name as … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1995, 9

10. Morphine, Yes Morphine were on their third album with Yes, and they’d previously been just successful enough on the left end of the dial that I had a working familiarity with them and their music. So I’m embarrassed to admit that it took me an extremely long time to figure out they were something of a descendent from the late-eighties bluesy rock band Treat Her Right, creators of one of the great sorta-hits of the era: “I Think She Likes Me.” In my defense, information about bands was fairly difficult to come by at that point in time, especially for those … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1995, 10