Teenage Fanclub – The Concept over 12 months that included Nevermind, Loveless and Screamadelica, Bandwagonesque – with a bag of cash on its sardonic cover – made No 1 in Spin magazine’s albums of the year list. (Years later, the band confessed that a fellow Scot, former Orange Juice drummer Steven Daly, was Spin’s senior writer, which might have been a factor.) But it wasn’t just the critics who loved them. Kurt Cobain called Teenage Fanclub “the best band in the world”; a couple of years later, Liam Gallagher was more measured, calling them the “second best band in the world” (after Oasis, of course). The playful lurch of The Concept embodied their newfound focus: equal parts bubblegum and Big Star, and with an extended guitar coda theguardian

Teenage Fanclub – Starsign takes a full 75 seconds to get going… The pace is urgent, the bass line taut and the guitars do their best Dinosaur Jr impression. Meanwhile, Gerard Love dismisses the idea of good luck and bad luck: “Hey, there’s a horseshoe on my door,” he sings. “Big deal.” … As stately as the band would become in its later years, “Star Sign” is a good reminder that they were once a young, fun, sloppy pop-rock band pastemagazine

Primal Scream – Movin’ On Up Whichever particular chemical intoxicant one chooses to believe it is about is open to question (the band have given differing stories), but Screamadelica remains – to many listeners, casuals and clubbers – one of the most starkly unique musical depictions of a drug trip ever put to tape. Emerging in 1991 just as acid house and ecstasy culture was emerging into the mainstream, the album takes you on a journey: the initial tingle of anticipatory excitement (‘Movin’ on Up’) through to the moment of coming up (that jawdropping saxophone interlude, followed by a moment of confused wonder on ‘Higher than the Sun’) through to euphoria (‘Come Together’) and finally to a reflective melancholy and the eventual comedown (‘Damaged’, ‘I’m Coming Down’) before eventually settling into blissful acceptance with one and the universe (‘Shine Like Stars’). A microcosm of a microdot.

The thing is, such a concept should have completely and absolutely fallen flat on its face. The idea of such an album is not only corny as hell to contemplate but also borderline ludicrous to imagine pulling off. Yet somehow it works. And why Screamadelica works so well is that the execution and delivery is utterly organic; overriding any sense of it being simply ‘a drug record’ and more a unique cultural touchstone for the era. drownedinsound

Nirvana – Smells Like Teen Spirit Retrospectively, its release is signified as the moment where grunge finally broke into the mainstream, earning them and some of their Seattle peers a legendary status. On the other hand, it spawned many bands who tried and failed to imitate the ‘Seattle Sound’, and the hideous movement of post-grunge in the latter half of the decade. Without its release we’d have no Placebo, but also no Nickleback. Make of that what you will. faroutmagazine

The KLF – Last Train To Trancentral – Live From The Lost Continent It’s a bullet express direct from the future, a symphony of jangly breakbeats, blissful piano lines, robot voices, church bells, and train whistles. More than any of their other songs, “Trancentral” both sums up the era of its production and transcends it. pitchfork

The Field Mice – Missing The Moon  it sounded like a proper hit single – at least in some parallel universe where “Everything I do I do it for you” wasn’t number one. It took all the New Order / Factory influences and threw it into a big sequencer led anthem, but still with wistful vocals and lovelorn words. It was seven minutes long but it could have gone on forever. agoldfishcalledregret

The Field Mice – Five Moments “For Keeps” is, quite often, lovely. There. I’ve said it. Satisfied?… One shouldn’t dismiss bands simply because they’re not rampantly masculine. One should rather laud them. nme

Blueboy – Clearer melodymaker

Saint Etienne – Nothing Can Stop Us soars from a flute, bass and drums passage taken from a 1967 Dusty Springfield album track, I Can’t Wait to See My Baby’s Face. They speed it up and turn it into a refreshing, shining statement about how powerful love can make you feel theguardian

Blur – There’s No Other Way captures a band full of the swagger and naivety of youth, and listening to their subsequent output it may as well be by a different band, but it somehow still sounds good today. And that’s because of one indisputable fact – even in their earliest incarnation, Albarn and Coxon knew how to write a catchy tune thestudentplaylist

U2 – Mysterious Ways “Heavy-bottomed but light-headed” in the words of the producer Brian Eno, Mysterious Ways is one of a number of Achtung Baby tracks to bear the influence of contemporary indie-dance, an inspiration U2 were able to assimilate remarkably well, hence this gleefully lubricious blast of wah-wah guitar, congas and funky bass. guardian

REM – Near WIld Heaven chronicles a relationship at loose ends: “Whenever we hold each other, we hold each other/ There’s a feeling that’s gone/ Something has gone wrong.” Despite the gloomy outlook, “Near Wild Heaven” sounds surprisingly upbeat. consequenceofsound

Matthew Sweet – Girlfriend The title track from Matthew Sweet’s breakthrough third album about losing love and falling back into it with someone new, “Girlfriend” captured the rush of the latter feeling as well as any song ever has, before or since. Seriously. popmatters

Lush – For Love Spooky operates on the listener like any good story. It’s got a beginning, a middle, and an end. It ebbs and flows, and you feel the time passing as you listen: it starts with a sunrise and ends at nighttime. There is a warm and comfortable blanket of desolation spread over the whole affair, a thick production (provided by the Cocteau Twins’ Robin Guthrie), heavy with effects, laden with harmonies and angelic, nearly indecipherable vocals. As you start to listen you wonder, “what are they talking about?” and as it ends you ask yourself, “does it even matter?”

you feel the time passing as you listen

The album works best as an album, though there are perfect songs sprinkled like glitter throughout — “For Love” is maybe the best song Lush ever recorded… There are weird bits of noise — random echoes and hints of laughter — throughout the Lush back catalogue which can only be accessed in the right light, with the right ears, at the right moment. Such was their magic. theverge

my bloody valentine – to here knows when Peer into “To Here Knows When” and, much like someone recognizing the common shapes of their own world in the clouds of a spring sky, you will see a lot of shoegaze’s thematic standards: innocence, pain, longing, love, and many others… as the song moves towards sonic oblivion, it maintains a steady upward movement: the cutting guitars and Bilinda’s reserved chorus are always grasping skyward. Combined, the song’s process paints a vivid and unsweetened portrait of rebirth, washing the listener in a bath of painfully corrosive acid as the song rises towards heavenly joy complex

my bloody valentine – only shallow Few pop albums are routinely described in religious terms but this is one of them. It’s partly because, like any scripture worth its salt, it leaves itself open to interpretation… there’s no telling what many of these songs “mean,” even after you’ve read the lyrics. They bypass the language center of the brain and head for other areas– where memory, tactile sensation, and emotions lie. It’s an album you feel more than one you understand…

I’ve heard many thousands of albums in my life and it’s one of the few that strikes me as being essentially perfect. It’s also the album that has turned two generations on to the wondrous possibilities of sound as sound… It remains a landmark that hasn’t aged a day. pitchfork

never before had an album been so visceral yet so serene faroutmagazine

The Hit Parade – In Gunnersbury Park light Sixties pop, jangly guitars, odd nods to Bossa Nova, an early Smiths strumminess, a Postcard Records sensibility, a Pastels-like naivety, lots of lyrics of yearning and of celebration of what might not obviously need celebrating…

There’s a twist. As The Hit Parade endured, Julian Henry went into working in marketing and public relations in the 1990s. Clients included Absolut Vodka and Coca-Cola, plus Michael Jackson and The Spice Girls. American Idol and Big Brother too. In 2007, he began working for Simon Fuller’s company and has worked with David and Victoria Beckham. Over 2007 to 2009 he wrote a series of articles for The Guardian on PR and the Tory party. The tension between being a dyed-in-the-wool indie musician and the role in high-end mainstream PR and marketing duly caught the attention of The Guardian’s culture section in 2011, to whom he said “I’ve built a huge brick wall between the two things, they just don’t overlap.” A form of psychological compartmentalisation then? theartsdesk

The Orchids – Peaches one of their finest moments. In some parallel universe “Peaches” would have been number one in the charts for sixteen weeks during the summer of ’91, not that Bryan Adams song. everythingindieover40

Heavenly – So Little Deserve melodymaker

Daisy Chainsaw – Love Your Money a slightly distorted little-girl-gone-vicious vocal pout atop the chunky bed of Richard Adams’ fuzz bass and songwriter Crispin Gray’s gnashing punk guitar. As acidly enjoyable as a lemon-sour candy, the London quartet happily recalls the loud, noisy hijinks of X-Ray Spex and the Slits while prefiguring poppier bands like Elastica trouserpress

Manic Street Preachers – Motown Junk It’s a gleefully violent rejection of pop as mass opiate; as brainless, numbing spectacle. (The band, of course, actually love Motown.) It’s concise, shock-tactic brilliance is a disillusioned finger-flick to decades of musical history, and the betrayal of pop’s promise of youthful dreams. “Songs of love echo underclass betrayal / Stops your heart beating for 168 seconds / Stops your brain thinking for 168 seconds.” guardian

contains possibly one of most satisfying ‘Woo-hoo”s in rock. nme

Guns & Roses – November Rain “If it’s not recorded right, I’ll quit the business,” Rose told Rolling Stone in 1988 about his magnum opus, the longest song to ever crack the Billboard Top 10. The frontman allegedly began writing the song as early as 1982, and a pre-Illusion rendition swelled to 18 minutes before being chiseled down to nine. In that time, the full breadth of Rose’s vision becomes crystal clear, as does his meticulous studio craft (all the symphonic overtones are digitally programmed) and razor-sharp pop instincts, honed by years of practicing Elton John and Queen songs on piano in his childhood home in Lafayette, In. Rose gives his most tender vocal performance and Slash lays down one of his most spellbinding solos in the song’s cathartic, climactic outro. popmatters

The Prodigy – Charly merges a juvenile voice sample and cartoon cat meowing with ‘Mentasm’-esque rave synths to raw and disorientating effect mixmag

Spirea X – Chlorine Dream Primal Scream refugee Jim Beattie spent 1991 leading a trio that made connections between the then-nascent shoegaze genre and folk-pop songsmithing from the 1960s… Spirea X’s signature song, the title track of the first EP, finds familiar elements of baggy music (hi-hat loops, well-timed horn blasts) hiding among echoing harmonies and a plangent guitar strum that wouldn’t have been out of place in a Byrds or early Kinks song treblezine

Primal Scream – Damaged Screamadelica’s weakest song, but Gillespie’s conviction makes it essential to the record pitchfork

The Wendys – Pulling My Fingers Off Signed to Factory Records thanks to Shaun Ryder’s dad Derek, the original album sadly coincided with their label’s financial problems (ironically caused in part by the Happy Mondays). isthismusic

Chapterhouse – Mesmerise unlike anything they had done previously and it marks a high point in their career… a lazy hazy summers day of a song rather than the melancholic moods that were associated with indie music at this time teenageshoegazer

Blake Babies – Temptation Eyes one of the band’s career highlights was this cover of a Grass Roots song magnetmagazine

Billy Bragg – Sexuality Sex by the end of the Cold War was a frightening proposition. A decade of Reagan/Thatcher Puritanism, combined with the threat of AIDS and the homophobia it spawned, combined to make human er… relations yet another battleground with literally life-and-death consequences. Against this background, Bragg’s lead single from his pop extravaganza Don’t Try This at Home felt like a breath of fresh air. Co-written with Johnny Marr, the song’s breezy production, cheery backing chorus (featuring Kirsty MacColl) all helped underscore the lighthearted, sex-positive hit long before that phrase migrated out of the university and into popular conversation. It was one of Bragg’s biggest singles and what’s amazing is how quintessentially Billy the song is, full of sardonic self-deprecation and even a reference to the Red Star Belgrade socialist football club. While lines like “Just because you’re gay / I won’t turn you away” or “Safe sex doesn’t mean no sex” may seem clunky and obvious in the era of Lady Gaga, they were revolutionary for the pop charts at the time. Plus, I’m sure that Gaga will never write a line as funny as “I feel a total jerk / Before your naked body of work” or deliver it with half of Bragg’s charm and insouciance. popmatters

The Wonderstuff – Welcome To The Cheap Seats It’s brief and upbeat but old-school sounding, like a sped-up waltz, filled with anachronisms and metamusic – it’s what me and my English lit friends in university might have pretentiously termed ‘pre-neo-anti-post-postmodernist’ mylifeinmusiclists

Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine – Sheriff Fatman Carter did a specific thing nobody else was doing, which made them popular, but that was all they did, so people got bored freakytrigger

The Wedding Present – Dalliance Gedge laments a former lover, who can best be described as unscrupulous. He compares himself to their current lover, who they’re also lying to, but typically, this doesn’t matter to the frontman, as he “still wants to” kiss his former flame. 

For ‘Dalliance’, it’s as if Gedge is having a conversation with himself, and as it continues, his frustration grows, which bursts into the Slint-like middle section, where the fuzz-drenched guitars pierce through the mix to create a pulsating drone. It’s pure genius. faroutmagazine

Pixies – U-Mass pretty much three minutes of satirizing college students interspersed with throat-shredding and string-twisting musical catharsis. In fact, after spending a whole verse mocking self-serious college students and things they hold dear (“Like capitalist / And communist / And lots of things you’ve heard about”), Black barely pretends to phone in a second verse in a rush to get back to the chorus, saying “And here’s the last five” before returning to dementedly screaming “It’s educational” until the word had been contorted almost to the point of breaking. popmatters

Beat Happening – Fortune Cookie Prize Heather sings this wistful song evoking the happenstance of love. Sometimes you find it when you least expect it, but the other half doesn’t quite know it. The best love song the band ever wrote. thefinestkiss

The Magnetic Fields – 100,000 Fireflies it’s pitch-black gallows humor, something Merritt’s made a career of. But when Anway belts out the heartbreaking line, “I’m afraid of the dark without you close to me,” it’s like a lover’s gentle whisper under the covers, an abject plea for connectedness. It ends humorously, as Anway admonishes, “You won’t be happy with me/ But give me one more chance/ You won’t be happy anyway/ Why do we still live here? In this repulsive town? All our friends are in New York.” With that lyric, she effectively articulates the dichotomy at the heart of the Magnetic Fields — in love or out of love, with sex or without sex, you won’t find happiness, and things will probably get worse — but the hell if we’ll ever stop searching. stereogum

Dinosaur Jr – The Wagon a blast of classic fast Dinosaur Jr louderthanwar

Violent Femmes – American Music Time, you are a motherfucker. We see you most on the faces of our favorite rock stars. The supposed fountain of youth, the elixir of the young, rock ‘n’ roll is supposed to be the domain of the nubile, the brashly and unapologetically fresh. We scoff when Mick Jagger struts and frets, guffaw when guys like Neil Young are still thrashing out with feedback. It’s better to burn out than fade away, right? Yet, are rock fans supposed to stop liking music when middle age approaches? Do aging musicians pack it in, give it up, move their beer bellies and wrinkled asses out of the way so the new stars can preen and parade? If rock ‘n’ roll really equals sex, does anyone still want to fuck the Violent Femmes? spectrumculture

Uncle Tupelo – Gun the opening track off Uncle Tupelo’s sophomore LP Still Feel Gone, was the first of the band’s songs I consciously remember listening to. A prime example of classic, early, Tweedy – in terms of the songwriting, delivery, and execution – the opener comes across like a rapid-fire shotgun blast. It also marks the sound of a band coming into their own aquariumdrunkard

The High – Up & Down with the Roses and early Primal Scream as their main touchstones, the band’s calico walled pop, all jangly Byrdsian guitar and melodies galore C91 liner notes

Northside – Take 5 Every time I hear it, I just want to get up and freak out on the dance floor, which is kind of inconvenient on the morning bus ride. It’s been known to get me some strange looks as I bop along. mylifeinmusiclists

Th’ Faith Healers – Gorgeous Blue Flower In My Garden The band writes some catchy melodies, then does its best to shred them to pieces trouserpress

Spiritualized – Anyway That You Want Me a cover of The Troggs’ rudimentary ’60s garage rocker… Actually, though, this sweeping, symphonic reinterpretation of a minor classic contained all the clues to Pierce’s future development. Ambitious, semi-orchestral and backed with the opiated drones of a two-part suite (‘Step Into The Breeze Parts 1 and 2’), it revealed a man who released from the acrimonious confines of the Spacemen was about to enter an orbit of his own. nme

Massive Attack – Unfinished Sympathy there is an argument that Unfinished Sympathy is too aesthetically perfect for it to be about something as flawed and seedy as love articflows

PJ Harvey – Dress A striking exercise in simmering anger, Dress takes a straightforward indie rock topic – unrequited love – and pushes it somewhere darker theguardian

The Ocean Blue – Ballerina Out Of Control still teenagers when they landed a major label record deal. Their first two albums, The Ocean Blue (1989) and Cerulean (1991), put them in heavy rotation on MTV and at college radio stations thanks to effervescent, intelligent singles like “Ballerina Out of Control,” bigtakeover

The Belltower – Outshine The Sun  had semi-associations with the early-’90s shoegazing scene, but only inasmuch as the tempos were sort of druggy, the guitars ringing and vast, and a slight sense of bliss-out was at play allmusic

The Boo Radleys – The Finest Kiss an amorphous but melodic wall of noise C91 linernotes

Black Tambourine – By Tomorrow if you’re a fan of much modern day indie, you’ll find snippets of Black Tambourine in the fabric. The band borrowed from its influences to influence the future; that’s pretty damn cool peanutbutterpope

Stereolab – The Light That Will Cease To Fail Stereolab puzzled the British music press when they first appeared: they were a group with a finely honed vision from the off, which meant writers couldn’t project their own desires onto their music. I mention this as the British music press is how many of us first discovered Stereolab, and the cumulative effect was to shroud singles like Super 45 in mystery. There was something inexplicable about their provenance; they just appeared. factmag

See See Rider – Stolen Heart They only made a couple of singles and the album was abandoned before it was released.  Their output actually made My Bloody Valentine look busy iwasateenageshoegazer