This album is like a Tim Burton twist on the tracks you hear in a Vinyasa yoga class. This is 2 hours and 36 minutes worth of ambient electronic music. Rolling Stone: Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works, Volume II It puts me in a state that is halfway between wanting to dance and wanting to sleep. This is like electronic music for people that don’t like electronic music. #96 Pitchfork: Herbert’s Around the House Listen to “The Book of Love” and you’ll understand. Clocking in at 2 hours and 52 minutes, 69 Love Songs is a musical anthology for the ages. And in this exploration of emotion, The Magnetic Fields also explore genre after genre. Now THIS is a concept album!!! As the name implies, this album consists of 69 love songs, chronicling everything fabulous, terrible, intoxicating, addictive, strange, giddy, and confusing everything that makes love love. Rolling Stone: The Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs Some are ethereal and slow, others are hectic and thrashing. Yet years later, having lived through a dictatorial regime, they revive their art and find great success doing so. Brought together by American guitarist Ry Cooder, this is a band of Cubans whose musical careers ended under the reign of Fidel Castro. But what’s most powerful about Buena Vista Social Club is its backstory. Commercially, it’s a smashing success–no small feat for a Spanish-singing band. I majorly admire KMD’s ability to rap about such a politically-charged topic while maintaining a sense of humor, but even so, I have to pick Buena Vista Social Club. Rolling Stone: Buena Vista Social Club’s Buena Vista Social ClubĮnchanting guitar, mesmerizing vocals, and true to its Cuban roots. Humor-infused race politics and pure 90s rap. It’s culturally significant, it played an influential role in the development of later rap, and it combines Raekwon, Ghostface, and RZA’s musical and personal chemistry into a potent, impressive album. Though Penthouse aligns more with my taste in music, Only Built 4 Cuban Linx is the clear winner. We float through our youth in a daze, and Penthouse captures that. Imagine lying in the sand at dusk on a summer day, watching the world melt around you–that’s what this album feels like. They build on each other and build on RZA’s beats, all the while creating a rap narrative seminal to the 90s. Raekwon and Ghostface bring each other to life in this. #99 Pitchfork: Raekwon’s Only Built 4 Cuban Linx Moby fuses pop, rock, and techno in a wonderfully cohesive way. And in that sense, Everything Is Wrong achieves greater success. While Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld is certainly experimental, there’s something to be said for accessible experimentation. This album took me through 13 different different moods in the span of 45 minutes. Rolling Stone: Moby’s Everything Is Wrong When I closed my eyes, did I feel like I was floating through the galaxy in a space module? Absolutely. Would I ever listen to this album again? Also no. Would I listen to any of the songs independently from the rest of the album? No. It’s like a church sermon from the year 3020. This made me want to be in a pitch black room, shuffling my feet and sporadically twitching different appendages. #100 Pitchfork: The Orb’s Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld If while reading this you have any thoughts/opinions/disagreements/compelling arguments about any of my choices, hit me with an email at –I’m always down to talk music! As I work my way through the lists, I’ll be choosing winners between the albums and keeping a running tally of which publication I agree with more. I’ll try anything once, and albums are no exception. And it is in embracing this spirit of musical subjectivity that I review them. There are albums on these lists that I hold near and dear, and albums on these lists that I really, truly do not like. And now, 30 years after the start of the 90s (my god), I’m listening my way through these lists, reviewing the albums as I go.įull disclosure: this is a completely biased review of both Pitchfork’s and the Rolling Stone’s Top 100 Albums of the 90s lists. It’s difficult to truly determine which albums left the deepest mark, but with their Top 100 Albums of the 90s lists, both Pitchfork and Rolling Stone Magazine have attempted to do so. From bringing grunge to the mainstream to serving as a defining decade of hip-hop, the 90s radically altered the musical landscape.