‘Inlet’: The Perfect Hum Album

I feel they know that I’m all alone
The stars are strange and this isn’t home
— “In the Den,” Hum

Note: This is not going to be a journalistic review of Hum’s new album, “Inlet.” Hum is one of my favorite bands, so I am biased. This is just a fan’s reaction.

***

Those familiar with the video game, “No Man’s Sky,” know well the abiding loneliness and isolation players are immersed in when they begin a new campaign. The main character is hurled through the cosmos, lands on a distant planet in an undiscovered region of the universe and has only a host of strange planets and animals to keep him (or her) company. Playing with other actual humans is apparently possible, but the game is so vast that the likelihood of finding a real person with whom to coalesce is slim to none. I have played for years, and I have found no one, other than aliens. And even that is foreign. Over time, the character has the opportunity to learn the vocabulary of various species, but at the start, players are, in every sense of the word, a stranger in a strange land.

From the early part of Hum’s career and their breakout single, “Stars,” from the band’s third album, “You’d Prefer an Astronaut,” fans have sensed a kind of persistence otherness and alienation in singer Matt Talbott’s lyrics (“She thinks she missed the train to Mars. She’s out back counting stars” and “I’m thinking of a number between everything and two”), either from a lonely protagonist in the songs or a pair of people exploring this life alone together, almost outside or beyond the rest of the world. Now that I think of it, it is apropos that this album was released in the middle of a pandemic, in which even some couples have had to isolate from each other. Planet Earth has been lonelier than usual the last four months. Enter Hum to apply the salve.

From the lyrics of several songs right down to the artwork’s desolate, void and unearthly landscape, “Inlet,” drops listeners down into oblivion with what seems like the fullest expression of their signature, heavy drop-D “wall of sound,” thunderous drums and bass underneath Talbott’s mellow and melodic vocals, and finally, rising above it all, soaring lead guitar riffs. In other words, the album has all one could hope for in a Hum album.

The album, which clocks in at 55:13 — another signature feature of Hum’s albums is that they always put the full runtime somewhere on the cover — contains no filler. Only one song (“Step Into You”) is under 5 minutes, and other tracks (“Desert Rambler,” “The Summoning,” “The Folding” and “Shapeshifter”) have an 8- or 9-minute runtime, but they never feel like long songs. Something about the flow of the songs, the melodies, the lead guitar and the structure help listeners almost get lost in the aesthetic and the musical landscapes pushing through their speakers. For those who like more straightforward rockers, the album offers “Waves,” “In the Den,” “Step Into You” and “Cloud City.” For others who favor the more epic pieces, the album has “Desert Rambler” and “Folding.” Similar to some tracks from Hum’s second album, “Electra 2000,” the guitars and drums on “Desert Rambler” relentlessly hammer the same riff for minutes on end, with some flourishes and riffs interspersed throughout for tonal variety. “Cloud City” and “Folding” are the best tracks on the album in my view.

I have listened to many bands that have either been heavily influenced by Hum or have adopted a similar sound, trying to find something to augment the experience of listening to them — The Deftones, Duster, La Dispute, Touché Amoré, Nothing, Cloakroom, Palms, Anakin and others — but I can’t. While I certainly like Duster, The Deftones and Anakin, none are replacements for Hum.

“Inlet,” with its spacial sounds, crunchy guitars and ethereal ruminations somewhere beyond the stars, is Hum perfected. I will always have a soft spot for the band’s earlier works, “You’d Prefer an Astronaut” and “Downward is Heavenward,” but if Hum never puts out another album, this one will stand as their crowning achievement.

Lost Between the Notes: My Top 10 Album Reviews, Part 4

I have got to find the river
Bergamot and vetiver
Run through my head and fall away
Leave the road and memorize
This life that pass before my eyes
Nothing is going my way — “Find the River,” R.E.M.

***

Twenty-eight years have passed since R.E.M. gave us an album that is drenched in beauty, sadness, exultation and mystery. These words could surely be used to describe multiple R.E.M. albums “Life’s Rich Pageant,” “Out of Time,” “Monster,” “New Adventures in Hi-Fi” but rarely does an album, any album, reach the emotional heights of “Automatic for the People” in the potent culmination of all of these elements coming together to form one of the seminal albums in rock history.

“Drive,” which opens the album with a simple picking of a Dm chord, reminds me, from a songwriting standpoint, of “Losing My Religion.” Both songs don’t seem to have much of a chorus or any sharp delineation between sections, yet somehow, both songs flow seamlessly in their own way to create a hypnotic, endless loop kind of feel. As the first single for the album, “Drive,” was a bust, and without a recognizable chorus or much of a hook, that’s not surprising. But as one of a great many R.E.M. songs that are challenging, both lyrically and musically, it has a certain power as it unfolds from the single arpeggio to the soaring strings and Peter Buck’s droning distortion near the end to Michael Stipe’s often inexplicable, yet metaphoric and moving lyrics. Almost as if Stipe is speaking about the band or himself, refusing to be put into a creative box, he tells us at the end, “Hey kids, rock and roll, nobody tells you where to go, baby.”

The next song is one of the emotional high points for me in all of R.E.M.’s discography. This album has several of those markers, which is why it’s number four in this list, and it very well could be number one, as there isn’t much distance between my top five.

“Try Not To Breathe” was especially poignant to me because it seems to relate the end-of-life thoughts of an old person who wants to go out on their own terms.

I will try not to breathe
This decision is mine
I have lived a full life
And these are the eyes that I want you to remember

I lived most of my adult life with chronic obstructive lung disease before receiving a double lung transplant, and even as a 20-something, I sometimes felt brittle and ancient, like my better days were far behind me. COPD is a slow-progressing condition such that, while you might not see much of a degradation in breathing capacity over the course of a few months or a year, the years begin to pile up, and one can tell a distinct different between what was possible from an exertion standpoint as a teenager versus what one could do 10 or 20 years later. COPD is a merciless, exhausting disease, and after awhile, the emotional weariness of struggling for breath every day begins to take a toll. On some days, I wanted to give up. Some nights, I wished to go to sleep and not to wake up. Without a transplant, there was no way out and no escape. I was drowning to death.

“Try Not To Breathe,” then, speaks to me of these thoughts: of wanting to die, of wanting to be remembered as a person who loved life, as a person who still loved life but simply couldn’t continue under the weight of immense suffering and personal anguish. Yet, in this beautiful and poetically vivid song, the character does not seem sad. He or she is almost triumphant, as if they are reclaiming their freedom and wanting to be liberated from a fate that threatens to rob them of joy. I was diagnosed with COPD as a teenager, but I did not breathe well all through my childhood, and by my early 20s, I had almost enough, and my joy for life was being eroded, painfully, day-by-day. I don’t want to dwell on my health here, and I don’t actually like talking about it, but this is a personal list and many of the songs that I have and will talk about, quite literally got me through some of the darkest days of my life. “Try Not To Breathe” is one of them.

Members of R.E.M. and producer Scott Litt must have known that, after a heavy song like “Try Not To Breathe,” listeners might need an emotional breather and a little levity. Decades hence, many of us still have no idea what “The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite” is about, but the lilting music and Stipe’s almost indecipherable lyrics and the chorus line, “Call me when you try to wake her up,” provided a freewheeling pick-me-up fans needed in the same vein as “Stand” and “Shiny Happy People” with references to Doctor Seuss, Nescafe, instant soup, black-eyed peas and a candy bar. If the previous song dealt with the potential loss of joy that comes with contemplating one’s own mortality, “The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite” helps us reclaim the joy and the childlike perspective of youth.

Andrezej Lukowski, with Drowned In Sound, suggested that if “Everybody Hurts,” the album’s fourth, had not been so popular, whether “Automatic” “might have ended up viewed as a sort of bleaker, hipper, tangent to ‘Out of Time,’ a ‘Nebraska’ (Bruce Springsteen) or ‘On the Beach’ (Neil Young) if you will.” Lukowski calls the song “atypical” for R.E.M. it certainly is a departure from the dark and weighty, almost Southern Gothic, lyrics on old age and death in “Try Not To Breathe,” “Sweetness Follows” and “Find the River” but “Everybody Hurts” is keeping with the album’s emotionally piercing material, except that in this song we get a message of solidarity and shared pain.

After a beautiful musical interlude (“New Orleans Instrumental No. 1”), which are typical on many R.E.M. albums, comes one of many songs on this record that manage to be both bleak and beautiful. One line summarizes the whole song.

We were altogether, lost in our little lives.

The message of “Sweetness Follows” seems to be a simple one: to appreciate friends and loved ones now before they are gone, and it’s too late.

Almost every album has a musical hinterland, where the songs get a little more experimental and less accessible. Some might say that the following three songs, “Monty Got a Raw Deal,” “Ignoreland” and “Star Me Kitten,” reach this territory on “Automatic.” I don’t think there is a bad song here. They aren’t as personally meaningful to me, but they are still must-listens, especially “Ignoreland,” which features Michael Stipe almost seething with rage about the conservative political landscape in America, especially the Reagan years.

These bastards stole their power
From the victims of the Us v Them years
Wrecking all things virtuous and true
The undermining social democratic downhill slide into abysmal
Lost lamb off the precipice into the trickle down runoff pool
They hypnotized the summer, ninteen-seventy-nine
Marched into the capital brooding duplicitous
Wicked and able, media-ready
Heartless, and labeled
Super US citizen, super achiever
Mega ultra power dosing, relax
Defense, defense, defense, defense

This is Stipe at his most acerbic. The melodic flow of lyrics, how he sings the words and how they stream together, along with the driving music from Peter Buck, Mike Mills and Bill Berry, is a remarkable feat of songwriting.

The closing three songs on “Automatic” offer more stunning examples of song-craftsmanship. So much has been said about “Man on the Moon,” Stipe’s homage to Andy Kaufman, that I will move along, except to say that the song has one of the strongest hooks in R.E.M.’s entire catalog.

As I was preparing to write this, I struggled with how to adequately describe my feelings about “Nightswimming,” and I haven’t come up with many answers. I don’t just listen to “Nightswimming.” I am transported into the song by the stark imagery, by the sense of longing for an experience that’s so innocent and childlike that it makes you cry. I press play and wake up, as if in a dream, into the aesthetic of the song. I look around in the dark of night. I sense the blackness all around me. I sense the void. I feel the warm summer air on my skin. I see the moon reflecting off the water as it gently laps the shore. I see a single, empty pier. I see a girl. I see her, and I see myself. We’re naked and unafraid. We feel devious and free in the stillness of night. We get in the lake and plunge the depths. The cool of the water envelopes our bodies. Gravity holds no sway here. We’re suspended. The night takes us in, and we feel alive with nature, with ourselves and with the world locked in a moment.

Nightswimming, remembering that night
September’s coming soon
I’m pining for the moon
And what if there were two
Side by side in orbit
Around the fairest sun?

Nightswimming deserves a quiet night.

The last song on the album, “Find the River,” seems to revisit themes of old age and mortality, and the imagery juxtaposes the beauty and steadfast permanence of nature with the uncertainty of human existence as we all approach the water’s edge and peer into the center of nothingness. As the song suggests, when we’re young, we feel as if we’re almost invincible and old age seems like “light years” away, but as the decades peel away, we become increasingly aware of our own vulnerability and impermanence. We search for meaning and truth. We search for beauty. We search for love. We search for joy, and we search for fulfillment. And yes, we search for the everlasting. For many of us, nature is the closest that we will ever get, and somehow, in its majesty and wonder, it’s enough.

Lost Between the Notes: My Top Album Reviews, Part 3

In a little while, I’ll be gone – Radiohead, “How To Disappear Completely”

Sadly, I can’t recall my initial reaction to Radiohead’s stunning critique and deconstruction of modernity, “Kid A,” from 2000. I just remember thinking that whatever this was, I needed to hear more of it, and so I enthusiastically gobbled up the band’s followup record, “Amnesiac,” upon its release a year later. I was working at a Clemson University souvenir shop called Mr. Knickerbocker at the time and told a fellow employee as I was opening the CD package something to the effect of, “I expect to be amazed at what I was about to hear” in light of the greatness that was “Kid A,” greatness of which I hope to elucidate in this post. Amnesiac continued the artistic and musical themes of “Kid A,” but it was the latter that captured my imagination and my heart.

I came to appreciate and adore Radiohead’s musical innovation and lyrical power fairly late in the game. Somehow I missed a lot of the hype surrounding the band’s first single, “Creep,” and its first record, “Pablo Honey” (1993). I also largely missed out on the band’s 1995 release, “The Bends,” and didn’t listen until sometime in the late 1990s after a friend recommended it. And even when I listened, I was on the fence about whether I actually liked most of it or not. I was a big fan of “Fake Plastic Trees,” but the rest of the album took some time for me to process. It grew on me by slow degrees. In fact, Radiohead’s DVD release, “7 Television Commercials” (1998), which was a collection of music videos from “The Bends” and the band’s next album, “OK Computer” (1997), had a lot to do with me getting into the band in more than just a casual way. The video for “Paranoid Android,” much like the song, was a wild and frantic ride, while the production for “Fake Plastic Trees,” all bright and colorful juxtaposed against the rather dull backdrop of a grocery store or retail outlet, punctuated a statement about the often artificial and superficial nature of society and culture.

But it was the video for “No Surprises” that spoke to me in ways that I hadn’t experienced before that point with Radiohead.

“Twinkle” is more of a visual word, but the opening guitar riff twinkles with the same beauty as the opening flashes of light reveal that Thom Yorke is inside a glass chamber or helmet that is slowly filling with water, which could symbolize the opening lines:

A heart that’s full up like a landfill

A job that slowly kills you

Bruises that won’t heal

As the song continues, the singer is sinking literally and figuratively under the weight of life until he makes the fateful decision:

I’ll take the quiet life

A handshake with carbon monoxide

With no alarms and no surprises

No alarms and no surprises

Silent

And finally, there is a moment of release at the end when he rises out of the water and relishes the sight of a “pretty house” and “such a pretty garden.” Watching this video was one of the most touching and inspiring moments of my early adulthood such that I could write an entire essay on this song alone, but the point is that this particular video symbolized for me the sense of existential dread that I was beginning to feel about life — trapped in this world and this life, surrounded by peril and knowing full well that there was only way out of the world, as Dave Matthews wrote. The feeling was made stronger by the fact that I was suffering from severe chronic obstructive pulmonary disease at the time and, however much I felt isolated and alone in my social life, I was even more depressed by my health situation. I couldn’t walk very far without getting tired, and I felt physically trapped by my circumstances. In a word, I was drowning, and no one could stop my slow march toward the grave. So, in this video, in just three minutes, Radiohead summarized for me, in a very personal way, my own struggle and hopeful liberation from certain annihilation. (After living with breathing problems for all of my childhood and most of my adult life, that liberation finally came in the form of a lung transplant three years ago.)

In any case, this is the backdrop for which I arrived at “Kid A” in the early 2000s. I listened to “Kid A” three times all the way through to prepare to write this piece because, number one, it’s a joy to let the pulsating beats and rhythms wash over me again and again, but number two, I wanted to listen for things that I might have missed before or open myself up to any new revelations about the music.

I chose “Kid A” for this list over “OK Computer” because, while the latter certainly has more than a few sublime songs, among them “Exit Music (For a Film),” “Let Down,” “Karma Police,” “Lucky” and the aforementioned, “Paranoid Android,” “Kid A’s” aesthetic and artistic direction spoke to me in the ways that few albums have. First, consider the artwork, which was created by the band’s longtime artist, Stanley Dunwood. The darkened and almost sinister looking background beyond the snowcapped mountains. The erupting volcanos. The rough-hewn lines and jagged edges. The void and barren landscape. The viewer brought almost to eye-level with the mountain peaks, as if floating in suspended animation as the artwork trails off in an ocean of white space and fractured lines.

This approach echoes that of the music, and generally, listeners get a sense that modernity itself is fractured, and the songs, awash with drum machines, synths, sparse guitar and Thom Yorke’s sometimes confident and buoyant, sometimes barely audible falsetto drowned out in a wail of noise, is all part of the plan.

Everything in its right place.

This album holds the position of number three on my list because first, it represents elements of my own existential philosophy, which I more or less adopted as a student at Lander (Greenwood, S.C.) and Clemson University (Clemson, S.C.) after studying the works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Albert Camus and others. For more on Radiohead’s tie to philosophy, see The Pennds: An Academic Approach to Radiohead:

Here is how it goes: In OK Computer, we stare into an impending and growing nihilistic despondency. In Kid A and Amnesiac, we are submerged in it. In Hail to the Thief, we are lamenting over it and losing faith. In In Rainbows, we accept it and trudge forward nonetheless. This is the story of a band that grew up and got comfortable, as much as they could, living in a world in which they felt they did not belong.

That leads me to the second reason why “Kid A” holds such a revered position with me. “Kid A” is about not belonging. It’s about losing one’s individuality and identity in a world consumed by consumerism, by popular culture, by all of the trappings of modernity. It’s about being drowned out in the claptrap. It’s about feeling invisible and the erasure of self. And it’s about disappearing completely.

The combination of the tracks, “Everything In Its Right Place;” “The National Anthem” with its blaring cacophonous wonder; “How To Disappear Completely,” with a swirl of strings and falsetto; “Optimistic;” “Idioteque;” “Morning Bell” and “Motion Picture Soundtrack” present a relatively cohesive and bleak musical aesthetic of one who is lost in the modern collective, never to be found.

Finally, I come to the album’s final song, “Motion Picture Soundtrack,” a devastating — devastating — song, with the accompanying video, that never fails to send chills up and down my spine.

The speaker in the song, presumably Thom Yorke or a character of his creation, is addressing his unrequited love and describing how desperate he is for her:

Red wine and sleeping pills

Help me get back to your arms

Cheap sex and sad films

Help me get where I belong

She interjects and says, “I think you’re crazy, maybe” and in the beginning of the video for the song, the words, “I’d really like to help you,” are etched into the sky, as if to suggest that the subject of this guy’s affections really cares for him but nonetheless sees how desperate he has become and must stay away. The music video for the song, which I watched over and over ad infinitum in my Mr. Knickerbocker days, pans through the bleak “Kid A” artwork landscape as if it was a real place. The camera then changes to a wintry scene in which a person is laying in the snow and another person, presumably the subject of the speaker’s forlorn desires, is gingerly walking away from the dying man as frozen precipitation cascades down.

Thus, the one thing that matters above all other more cerebral concerns — philosophy or statements about societal status or individuality — is love, but even in that, the speaker feels lost, alone, isolated and abandoned. What “Kid A” lacks in comfort or optimism — despite a song that is actually titled “Optimistic” — it makes up for in emotion, power and a coherent aesthetic. This album, and knowing that others have struggled with feeling small, alienated and lost by circumstances or by the culture, has helped me through many a dark day and because of that, “Kid A” will always hold a treasured place in my heart.

Lost Between the Notes: My Top 10 Album Reviews, Part 2

If we both stand with absent eyes / And think about the oceans, watch ’em dry / We can see far to the other side / It’s you and I forever, we don’t have to hide — Hum, “Little Dipper”

***

My friend and I were on the phone one Sunday night in 1995 watching MTV’s “120 Minutes” when we saw a guy behind a guitar who looked a little like myself eyeglasses, messy and slightly wavy hair, an unkempt button up shirt with a white T-shirt underneath. He was softly playing a clean electric guitar, singing the words, “She thinks she missed the train to Mars. She’s out back counting stars.” He repeated the line, but on the second time through, a thunderous crunch rained down on the word “stars,” and the distortion sustained for several seconds before fading out as ocean waves peel back from the coast. A few more bars of clean guitar before lift-off. And then, a riotous introductory drum beat cascading into a guitar riff so divine that it managed to take the listener on a journey from the depths to the heights of harmony and sound, all in the span of 4 seconds. My eyes widened. My pulse quickened. My heart, like the music, soared. My voice rose in pitch, and in a rare moment of sheer delight, I let out a Beavis-worthy screech of “Yes!”

Such was my introduction to Hum, a band that did not have a lot of commercial success and only made four albums, one of which, “You’d Prefer an Astronaut,” is pretty much the only one that is remembered, and it’s barely remembered at that. But the band, along with The Smashing Pumpkins, came to represent in my mind the best of what alternative rock and roll could be thoughtful, poetic and lyrically challenging and musically majestic. I loved the music of “Stars,” the dynamic range and the confluence of Matt Talbott’s mellow voice with the circling distortion and drums, but it was the imagery of the song that really captured my imagination as a teenager:

I thought she’d be there holding daisies, she always waits for me
She thinks she missed the train to Mars, she’s out back counting stars
I found her out back sitting naked looking up and looking dead
A crumpled yellow piece of paper, with seven nines and tens

That paints a picture in my mind of a girl sitting in the backyard under the stars scribbling something, perhaps an indecipherable something, on a yellow legal pad. I don’t know, and still don’t know, what it meant to me then or what it means to me now, but I do know that it’s a stark and enduring image. Lyrics such as these, spacey, full of mystery and breathed to life somewhere in the cosmos, punctuate the entirety of “You’d Prefer an Astronaut” and much of Hum’s library, including the 1998 follow-up “Downward Is Heavenward.”

Sam Blum, with the AV Club, called Hum’s music “an adventure in exploring musical opposites:”

It could be thunderous and unrelenting, but restrained, measured, and mopey at the same time. The music could be melancholic and boisterous, but still downtrodden and catchy. Combining all of these disparate moods made the band purveyors of something bold and even genius. 

“You’d Prefer an Astronaut is only nine songs long. Normally, I would balk at a full album that is only nine tracks, but these songs cover a lot of ground musically and lyrically, running the gamut from emo-like, quiet and subdued on tracks like “The Very Old Man” and “Songs Of Farewell and Departure,” to scorchers like “The Pod” and “I’d Like Your Hair Long.”

The first song on the album, “Little Dipper,” sets the tone for a kind of space odyssey on which Hum is about to take listeners. Underneath the heavily distorted main guitar, a second guitar drones and undulates with a pulsing, hypnotic quality that lays the bedrock for Talbott’s matching drone on vocals until the end, when his voice fades with the line, “We won’t let them take you; we won’t let you die” before terminating in a swell of distortion and leading seamlessly into the wild, cosmic ride of “The Pod.”

The album’s fourth track, “Suicide Machine,” is a rich panoply of sound, of clean guitars and later, near the end of the song, heavy distortion, and bracing lyrics that tell a sad tale of loss and regret:

Sleep comes to no one else like we have falling through the ground,
Fulfilling promises of endless summer nights, I’m losing ground, you’re losing sound
Somewhere through a thousand blues a dragonfly descends with just a whisper,
“I’m lonelier than God”
And all my wishes spin the fishes in the air and every one
A different shade of you

And to the left where up is down now stands a zebra
Made of shapes of me, and silver and the sun
So bring no guilt with you up above the flat line
Let’s just hit the sky exploding into one

The eighth track, “I Hate It Too,” offers some of the clearest lyrics on the record. “I need you to give me meaning. I need you to share the view.” The song begins with Talbott’s voice and clean guitar before exploding into a wave of feedback and crashing down into heavy distortion.

The ninth track, “Songs Of Farewell and Departure,” is, without question, musically, the prettiest song on the album and one of the sweetest sentiments you are likely to hear from an alternative band or any other band:

A love song to everyone I know. Arms wide open. Here we go.

The song, like the whole album, is grounded in human emotion and poetic sentiment, but musically, it soars with feedback and harmonies that seem to pierce the night sky and was an appropriate way to end an album that was meant to transport listeners, and probably Talbott himself, to another dimension; for music alone has the power to take us places that few art forms can.

I hope this has conveyed the breadth of my appreciation and love of this album and why, of the hundreds of albums that I could have chosen for this list, it is No. 2 in my all time top albums list. “You’d Prefer an Astronaut” captured my imagination and my young teenage heart with its poetry, with its other-worldliness and with its rich musical landscapes. I hope you also come to enjoy it as much as I do. Give it a spin.

Here we go.

Lost Between the Notes: My Top 10 Album Reviews, Part 1

Before you run away from me / Before you’re lost between the notes
The beat goes round and round / The beat goes round and round — Radiohead, “Jigsaw Falling Into Place”

***

I’m taking a little break today from more serious topics to start a series in which I review my top 10 influential albums of all time. I selected these albums based on emotional impact on me personally and quality of songs from top to bottom and not necessarily commercial success. I also limited the list to one album per artist. I don’t normally get too biographical here, but I thought this series would be a good exercise — number one, to give a renewed, close listen these albums again and perhaps, pick out elements that I might have missed before either lyrically or musically, and number two, to openly reckon with my own musical past about what these songs and albums have meant to me over the years or what they still mean to me. As such, some of these entries will feel more like traditional reviews of classic albums, while others will have a more personal bent. At the very least, I hope it makes for some interesting reading. And away we go …

Top 10 albums with five honorable mentions:

  1. Counting Crows: “August and Everything After”
  2. Hum, “You’d Prefer an Astronaut”
  3. Radiohead: “Kid A”
  4. R.E.M.: “Automatic for the People”
  5. Smashing Pumpkins: “Siamese Dream”
  6. +Live+: “Throwing Copper”
  7. Death Cab for Cutie: “Plans”
  8. Our Lady Peace: “Happiness Is Not a Fish That You Can Catch”
  9. The Beatles: “Magical Mystery Tour”
  10. Pearl Jam: “Vs.”

And the best of the rest:

  • Tool: “Lateralus”
  • Alanis Morisette: “Jagged Little Pill”
  • Hootie and the Blowfish: “Cracked Rearview”
  • The Cranberries: “No Need To Argue”
  • Bush, “Sixteen Stone”

“August and Everything After

It’s hard to overstate how much of an impact Counting Crows’ breakout debut album had on my life as a teenager. If, as a younger boy in middle school or junior high, The Beatles introduced me to rock and roll music and unlocked in me an emotional side unlike anything I had experienced up to that point, Counting Crows broke me open and helped me lay bare feelings that I either didn’t know I had or didn’t know how to access. I don’t remember ever crying while listening to a song before “August and Everything After” came along, but even today, when I get a fresh listen to songs like “Anna Begins,” “Sullivan Street” or “Raining In Baltimore,” the emotional weight of the lyrics, combined with the music and the vocals of lead singer Adam Duritz, not just singing the lyrics, but feeling and embodying the lyrics and sounding almost desperate at times in his delivery, often makes me tear up all over again.

Casual music fans will certainly know the high-water tracks “Mr. Jones” and “Round Here.” Indeed, it was on the strength of “Round Here,” a quintessential Counting Crows song with a poetic and vulnerable style of songwriting, and particular the band’s performance of it on “The Late Show with David Letterman” that really jump-started their popularity when fans realized that the band, and Adam’s singing style, reached an emotional depth that only a select number of bands actually achieve.

At the time, I was coming off an interest in 1980s and early 90s country music, oldies rock and roll, Billy Joel and other videos I saw on VH1. I discovered “August and Everything After” at a crucial and impressionable time in my life, and needless to say, the album struck a chord with me because before that point, I had never come across a band or songwriter that touched me to the same depths that Duritz’s songwriting touched me. His songs seemed to get at the core of who I was and what I was struggling with in the mid-1990s, and as I grew up with the band into adulthood and matured with the band, the lyrics remained poignant as I looked back and remembered the well-worn feelings of isolation or longing or despair that troubled me as a youth, and often still trouble me.

Drawn to the emotion of Counting Crows’ music, the band, along with others like R.E.M., The Beatles and Pearl Jam, inspired me to write my own poetry or music, but more than that, the imagery of Duritz’s lyrics, even today, is perhaps responsible for my preference, some 25 years later, for the color gray or for bleak and cloudy winter days.

Tyler Clark, with Consequence of Sound, described Duritz’s various gloomy images on “August” as melancholy snow globes:

In the scenes Counting Crows conjure, the season is a perpetual state of almost-winter, the weather overcast, the time of day always slightly later than it responsibly should be. Within these melancholy snow globes, Duritz grapples with woes both private and interpersonal, lit here and there by a bedroom lamp, a neon beer sign, the dome light of a car speeding all by itself down a long, dark road. 

“August” was the second or third CD I ever owned, and I also had the cassette version for playing in the car and in the Walkman. My obsession with this band and with this album ran deep. I don’t entirely remember the content, but I once gave a school presentation on the symbolic nature of the song, “Rain King.” I remember taking the album along on at least one or two summer trips with my family and either “forcing” my parents to play it over the car speakers — they were actually kind enough to play it for me and endure my new foray into alternative rock and roll music — or listening to the album through my headphones and not so quietly singing along.

And as a lasting testament to the inspiration I drew from Counting Crows, I had taken a Sharpie and wrote the line, “In August and Everything After, I’m After Everything,” on the back of my backpack in the same font style as the album cover above. The line came from a song that wasn’t on the album and was subsequently recorded and released in January of last year, but some of the lyrical fragments were visible on the album cover, and they spoke to me, namely, the line I wrote on the backpack, “I stumbled into Washington Square,” “I’m sorry” and “You look into her eyes, and it’s more than your (heart will allow) …” I couldn’t read the rest of the line in parenthesis, but these spoke to me about regret, longing and not knowing which direction to take or whether to take any direction at all. The actual line, “In August and Everything After, I’m After Everything” meant a lot to me personally because I was a shy or reserved child and struggled, not only to meet friends, but to meet girls, and the lyric suggested a kind of pessimistic hopefulness that things might be different once school started and new opportunities to meet people would abound, in contrast to the often lonely summer months when meeting new people was less likely. Duritz was born on Aug. 1, so for him the meaning of the line may have been more literal, but for me, it was the symbolic hope of a new start, a new start that, admittedly, I didn’t quite believe in.

But I nonetheless hoped.

I’ll go through a few of the songs that had the most impact on me as a teenager. The emotional depth and weight of these selected songs, along with my opinion that the album, as a cohesive piece of art, is strong from top to bottom, is the reason why it gets No. 1 billing on this list.

Round Here

Step out the front door like a ghost
Into the fog where no one notices the
Contrast of white on white.
And in between the moon and you the angels
Get a better view of the crumbling
Difference between wrong and right

The first track of the album, “Round Here,” opens with about 20 seconds of feedback leading into the main guitar riff that sets the tone for a song that seems to be about a person who is grappling with newfound freedom and doesn’t know which direction life is going to take, as was certainly the case for me as a teenager and into my early- to- mid-20s. That person may be living on their own and away from authority figures for the first time, and thus is able to do whatever they want (“We’re never sent to bed early and nobody stays up late”) or newly separated from a partner or both. In either case, the introductory lyrics suggest a narrator who doesn’t know how to find their place in the world.

It’s difficult for me to pinpoint exactly what this song means to me in concrete terms. Like many of these songs, there isn’t a particular person or memory that comes to mind when I listen to “Round Here” today, but it’s more like a feeling, the feeling of teenage angst, the feeling of being locked inside a set of rules under someone else’s roof, the longing for liberation and the bittersweet release of finally feeling free under a vacant sky, yet weighed down by loneliness, indecision and aimlessness or depression. When I’m in the car by myself and there is no one to hear or see me, and thus no self-consciousness, I can sometimes tap into raw emotion, put myself inside the lyrics of this song, wandering through the fog and trying to find my way in life, singing these lines near the end of the song:

Round here she’s always on my mind
Round here, hey man, I got lots of time
Round here we’re never sent to bed early and nobody makes us wait

then, as the swirling feelings of sadness, malcontent and anger mix and build, I sometimes find myself virtually screaming this climax:

Round here we stay up very, very, very late (!)

Perfect Blue Buildings

Just down the street from your hotel, baby
I stay at home with my disease
And ain’t this position familiar, darling
Well, all monkeys do what they see
Help me stay awake, I’m falling …

Adam has said this song is about insomnia, but I have always personalized this track, and particularly the lyrics, “I stay at home with my disease,” to reflect the breathing problems that I dealt with most of my adult life before I received a double lung transplant in February 2017. Over time, chronic breathing problems (“I stay at home with my disease”) breaks your will and in your worst moments, makes you want to stop participating in life (“There’s a dead man trying to get out”). Couple that with social problems — having trouble making new friends or meeting people and the depression that comes with it — and sometimes, you just want to stay inside and be left alone with your “disease,” and you come to prefer the dream world (“Asleep in perfect blue buildings/Beside the green apple sea”), what life could be when you close your eyes, to what life actually is.

Anna Begins

Other than the emotions associated with losing a love or feeling the loss of a love that only existed in the imagination or dreamworld, I, again, don’t have a specific memory or idea associated with “Anna Begins,” but it’s one of four or five songs on this record, along with “Round Here,” “Sullivan Street,” “Time and Time Again” and “Raining in Baltimore” that routinely summon strong feelings in me with each new listen. One thing I have always appreciated about Counting Crows is their ability to take the listener on an emotional journey in their songs, and this song has a buildup into the final chorus that sometimes brings tears and sometimes just makes me sing at the top of my lungs with Adam, feeling the pain of loss and longing and regret alongside the character in the song.

In “Anna Begins,” it seems that Anna and the speaker are exchanging doubts about whether the relationship will work or whether they’re even “ready for this sort of thing.” At first, “when kindness falls like rain,” Anna changes her mind. Later in the song, Anna changes his mind, and he reflects on how he loves even the little things about her (“Every time she sneezes I think it’s love, and oh lord, I’m not ready for this sort of thing”),” but despite this, he holds onto his doubts. Near the end of the song, when he finally decides he is ready for a relationship with her, it’s too late, and she’s gone:

Her kindness bangs a gong
It’s moving me along and Anna begins to fade away
It’s chasing me away
She disappears and
Oh Lord, I’m not ready for this sort of thing

Time and Time Again

I wanted so badly
Somebody other than me
Staring back at me
But you were gone

This is a wasteland of a song — lonely and barren — that comforted me in some of the moments that I have felt most alone. Like so many times traveling in the car by myself on the open road either going back and forth to Boston or South Carolina, listening to this song, I could imagine myself “traveling on a freeway beneath this graveyard western sky” heading deep into the desert outside California with nothing but the sky and the setting sun as a backdrop. This reminds me of another Counting Crows song called “John Appleseed’s Lament,” where the speaker in the song personifies the sky as a girlfriend or partner that keeps him company in the absence of others:

I call the wind Maria because I do not know her face
I call the endless sky Amelia
Because she stays with me from place to place
I call the sun my love Emmanuelle
Because she cradled me in her embrace

Sullivan Street

This one speaks to me of regret in love and loss and the eventuality of knowing that a relationship, sooner or later, is going to end (“Pretty soon now, I won’t come around”) and the ensuing loneliness and despair that will follow. When the first D chord hits whenever I fire up this song, it’s like my heart begins preparing for the emotions that are about to come flooding forth in the next four minutes. In the first verse, he is thinking about driving her home and already describing the relationship or memories of the relationship as “shadows,” and in the second verse, the couple has already broken up, and she is pretending not to know him. He is pretending not to care. By the third verse, he’s describing himself as “just another rider (or lover) burned to the ground.” While I can certainly relate to the experience of driving a girl home all the while doubting that the relationship is going to last, the song’s overall aesthetic — Adam’s voice, combined with the music and lyrics — brings up deep emotions almost every time I listen.

Raining In Baltimore

This is a simple and sad song about missing someone who is far away, and the solo instrument and Adam’s pained voice add to the effect. As I understand it, the speaker is in Baltimore and his love is 3,500 miles away across the country, and he is probably not going to see her again (“What would you change if you could?”).

Nonetheless, he is feeling utterly alone without her. He needs a phone call. A raincoat. A big love. A plane ride. A sunburn. He can’t get any answers or any change; except for the rain and missing her, everything else is the same.

A Murder of One

During Counting Crows’ This Desert Life tour, I got to see Counting Crows in Toledo, Ohio. I lived in South Carolina at the time, and being obsessed with the band as I was and since Toledo was one of the closest places they were coming to where I lived that summer, I took a road trip by myself. The concert was at the Toledo Park Zoo ampitheater. During that particular tour, Adam usually screamed “Step right up!” at the beginning of “A Murder of One,” which was a cue for people in the audience to jump up and down while the rest of the introduction was played before the opening verse. Already having had my fill of beer and under normal circumstances, I probably wouldn’t have budged, but on this night, I, along with couple thousand strangers, started bouncing together in sync, as if there was no longer any real world in which to return, as if we, alone — myself, my fellow Counting Crows fans and the band — experienced life as a singular entity under that dark globe of moonlight and stars. It was one of my more memorable concert experiences.

Jim Farber has said that “August and Everything After” painted a

fully credible portrait of a young man struggling to accept himself, to find some way to be comfortable in his own skin.

And perhaps that explains, more than anything, why I took to the album and the band so much. In 1993 when the album was released, I was in transition, not just musically, but emotionally and as a person. I wasn’t very attuned to my own emotions. I didn’t have great self-esteem, and I had trouble meeting people, especially girls. I didn’t know who I wanted to be, and I was unsure of where I was headed. I didn’t know how I felt about life or that it was even OK to have feelings or to express them as a boy. Even if I sometimes felt alone in life, I somehow felt less alone when I hit play on the album with the knowledge that someone else, somewhere, had experienced similar feelings. In “August” and in Duritz’ lyrics, I found that it was acceptable to have and express deep emotional feelings. Like I suppose many others have in my situation, as impressionable teenagers just beginning to dabble in a new world, a newly discovered amalgamation of poetry and song, I found a kind of kindred spirit in Duritz and the work of Counting Crows, and I found a voice, even if it was someone else’s, in music and meaning that would inspire me to create my own for decades to come.

In August and everything after, I was after everything.

Still Remains: On Scott Weiland’s death and STP

Too much trippin’ and my soul’s worn thin. – Scott Weiland

***

On Our Lady Peace’s 2003 live album, lead singer Raine Maida gave a speech before a rendition of the song, “Are You Sad,” and essentially told the audience that most everyone knows someone who desperately needs saving from their own personal demons, and no matter how much we might want to rescue these people, the reality is that some have simply drifted too far out to sea and can’t be led back to the shore.

Scott Weiland, 48, who struggled with drug and alcohol abuse for the better part of 20 years, if not longer, strikes me as just that kind of tragic figure. Weiland, as most music fans know by now, was found unresponsive in his band’s tour bus earlier today and later pronounced dead. While all drug-induced deaths are tragic, this one was particularly so because here was a rock star with a truly masterful presence on stage as the lead singer of one of the most influential bands of the grunge era. Stone Temple Pilots, along with Pearl Jam and Nirvana, more or less shifted the landscape in the early 1990s, thus paving the way for countless copycat bands like Creed and Nickelback, who attempted, and mostly failed, to resonate musically and emotionally with fans in the same way as these three, and in the same way as Weiland, Eddie Vedder and Kurt Cobain, all three of whom had — in Vedder’s case, still has — a signature growl and unique vocal abilities that were often cheaply imitated.

While all three had a unique stage presence — Cobain, appearing almost to be singing and playing as if no one else was in the room and Vedder, a man of the people, diving into the crowd and climbing stage apparatuses in his early days — Weiland was equally unmistakable, adopting both the flamboyancy of the 1980s rock frontmen and exuding the melancholic restraint of many of his idols, The Flaming Lips, The Pixies and The Beatles. People tend to pay attention when you walk on stage brandishing a megaphone a la Michael Stipe:

I have always been a music fan, thanks in part to my father and grandfather’s influence, but when STP first became popular, I actually wasn’t a big fan of the band’s first album, “Core,” Pearl Jam’s “Ten” or Nirvana’s “Nevermind” for that matter. I was actually coming out of a strange musical period at the time. During my childhood when I didn’t have that much of a choice about what to listen to, I was a fan of old school country music, but in junior high, I began branching out into oldies and got interested in The Beatles, which was my first introduction into rock and roll. Also at this time, I got into a routine of using my time at night before bed to listen to an oldies radio station — in the late 1980s, the oldies were defined as music from the 1950s and 60s — and draw comic book characters and other things by the lamplight. By the late 1980s and early 90s, by some odd transition that I fail to understand myself, I got into pop music and started making radio mixed tapes, which included music from UB40, Culture Beat, Celine Dion, Toni Braxton, Ace of Base and others.

The release of Counting Crows’s album, “August and Everything After” in September 1993 changed everything for me, musically and personally, for I began to view music, not just as a combination of interesting lyrics and storytelling over some melodious tunes, but as a form of artistic expression, and in the case of Counting Crows, a more beautiful and perhaps even more melancholic extension of myself. This is where I was musically when I began to appreciate STP’s “Core” from start to finish, and by the time the band’s second album, “Purple,” was released in early 1994, which to me is even stronger than “Core,” I was hooked.

Indeed, going back and listening to some of these tracks now that Weiland is no longer with us, is a chilling exercise indeed, especially since Weiland never shied away from examining topics like the loss of innocence, deep and unrestrained, bathwater-drinking love, betrayal even mortality. After “Core” and “Purple,” STP went on to make the two times platinum selling album, “Tiny Music… Songs from the Vatican Gift Shop,” less successful releases like, “No. 4” and “Shangri-La Dee Da” and another self-titled record, before the band fired Weiland in 2013.

Except for the final offering, I have carried all these albums and songs with me at each stage of life. As a side note, and perhaps continuing my longstanding obsession with listening to music as I do other things, while I was in college, I adopted another habit of reading short stories for my college classes at Clemson with “Shangri-La Dee Da” on continuous play in the background. I now associate the album with my senior year of college, reading American literature with a steady stream of loud guitars and Scott Weiland’s sometimes smooth, sometimes rattly vocals piping into my headphones (Perhaps the similarities between the album cover, which is all orange, and Clemson’s burnt orange team color, sealed the association for me).

That said, I and many other alternative music fans were saddened by the news, but given Weiland’s myriad problems with drug abuse, he was honestly lucky to have been around 48 years, as his heart had surely taken a beating, literally and figuratively, all these years. This letter from the remaining members of STP provides a better sendoff than a long-time fan like myself ever could:

Dear Scott,

Let us start by saying thank you for sharing your life with us.

Together we crafted a legacy of music that has given so many people happiness and great memories.

The memories are many, and they run deep for us.

We know amidst the good and the bad you struggled, time and time again.

It’s what made you who you were.

You were gifted beyond words, Scott.

Part of that gift was part of your curse. (italics mine)

With deep sorrow for you and your family, we are saddened to see you go.

All of our love and respect.

We will miss you brother,

Robert, Eric, Dean

Me too. For what it’s worth, I’m sorry, Scott, that no one could bring you back to shore.

The Taylor Swift-Ryan Adams phenomenon

taylor swift

Here is an interesting article about how Pitchfork seems to have gone to great lengths to more or less ignore Taylor Swift, that is, until Ryan Adams decided to cover “1989.”

I tend to agree that “Pitchfork’s decisions have something to do with some vague notion of ‘edge.'”

And to add my own point, Swift’s lyrics seem to be laden with cliches and pop drivel, which is, I think, at the center of why she does not get more attention from the musical inteligencia, alternative and indie communities.

What’s more, and for reasons that I fail to comprehend, she barely has a presence on Spotify.

Top 50 alternative bands of all time: 20-29

Click here to see picks 30-39.

20. The Flaming Lips

Do you realize that you have the most beautiful face/Do you realize we’re floating in space/Do you realize that happiness makes you cry/Do you realize that everyone you know someday will die

And instead of saying all of your goodbyes let them know/You realize that life goes fast/It’s hard to make the good things last/You realize the sun doesn’t go down/It’s just an illusion caused by the world spinning round

Do You Realize/Do You Realize/that everyone you know/Someday will die

And instead of saying all of your goodbyes let them know/You realize that life goes fast/It’s hard to make the good things last/You realize the sun doesn’t go down/It’s just an illusion caused by the world spinning round

Do you realize that you have the most beautiful face/Do you realize

21. Weezer — Weezer blazed onto the scene as a band that still had that metallic punch of guitar distortion and fuzz, but without all of the angst or pensiveness of some of their contemporaries. While the self-titled “Blue Album” and “Pinkerton” are beloved fan classics, the band still enjoyed with acclaimed success the “Green Album,” “Maladiot” and “Make Believe,” selling a total of more than 9.2 million albums in the United States and about 17.5 million worldwide. “Make Believed” reached number two on the U.S. charts and number one in Canada. And, of course, all those accolades aside, they brought geek rock to the mainstream:

22. The Replacements  No top alternative list would be complete without The Replacements, and they just edge out Sonic Youth and the Meat Puppets for their sheer longevity and influence on the industry.

23. Depeche Mode  Not to overstate matters, but Q Magazine has listed Depeche Mode as one of the 50 bands that changed the world, and “the most popular electronic band the world has ever known.” At more than 75 million albums and singles sold worldwide, Depeche Mode is one of the most successful bands of all time. Enough said:

24. The Offspring  One of the highest selling punk rock bands in history, The Offspring’s third album, “Smash,” sold 20 million by itself, with the breakout tracks, “Self Esteem,” “Come Out and Play” and “Gotta Get Away.” After the mediocre offering, “Ixnay on the Hombre,” The Offspring enjoyed its greatest mainstream popularity to date with “Americana,” with the songs “Pretty Fly (for a White Guy)” and “The Kids Aren’t Alright.” The band had another standout track in 2012 with “Days Go By.”

25. Arcade Fire  With just four albums under their belts since the release of “Funeral” in 2004, Arcade Fire has seen a meteoric rise in popularity, basically skipping over the sophomore slump phase and going straight to cult status as one of the most innovative, diverse acts of this generation. Among their many accolades, the band won the Grammy of the Year award for their album, “The Suburbs.” Their most recent offering was “The Reflektor, which “Rolling Stone” named the top five release of 2013. Here they are performing the French cover, “Poupée de Cire, Poupée de Son:”

26. Sonic Youth  Sonic Youth has been around for as long as R.E.M. and is an influential as any other band on this list. With their experimental and ferocious guitar style, they came to define alternative grunge before grunge was a thing, releasing five albums before 1990s. An idyllic photo of band member Kim Gordon walking across her bass tells the story of “disaffected youth” like no band before them could. And one only has to listen to the opening seconds of “Kool Thing” to hear the inspiration behind songs like Nirvana’s “Aneurysm” and many others.

27. Coldplay  To say that Coldplay has, at least temporarily, abandoned their roots is probably a mild understatement here in 2014 with the release of the squeaky clean, synth-pop, lovefest known as “Ghost Stories,” but the band was once an influential rock act in the same vein of Oasis, Radiohead and U2. While I personally enjoyed parts of “Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends” (not the least of which was a tune that didn’t even make it onto the official cut, “Life in Technicolor II“), I view “X&Y” as Coldplay’s last true rock album. The rest of it — well, let’s just stick with classics: “X&Y,” “A Rush of Blood to the Head” and “Parachutes.” That’s really all the Coldplay you need to put them in the top 30 on this list.

28. Bush  Bush’s “Sixteen Stone” was one of a handful alternative rock albums in the 1990s in which almost half the record became a radio single. Off the strength of singles, “Everything Zen,” “Come Down,” “Glycerine,” “Machine Head” and “Little Things,” the debut album sold more than 10 million albums in the United States, although the band didn’t enjoy equal success in their native England. After 1996’s “Razorblade Suitcase,” the band fell out of the mainstream until 2011 when their new album, “Sea of Memories,” hit number 18 on the Billboard Top 200 chart.

29. Meat Puppets  Like Teenage Fanclub, Sonic Youth, The Replacements and The Flaming Lips, Meat Puppets influenced countless bands coming out of the early 1990s alternative rock scene, including Nirvana, Sound Garden and Dinosaur Jr.:

Top 50 alternative bands of all time: 30-39

Click here to see picks 40-50.

30. 311 — During a period in the early 1990s dominated by grunge and gritty distorted guitars pounding out teenage angst, 311 brought some diversity to the genre, fusing numerous traditions, including metal, rap, raggae, jazz and funk, into one surprisingly smooth sound and paving the way for bands, like the Gorillaz, to take alternative rock in new sonic directions.

31. Teenage Fanclub — Perhaps best known for the song, “Mad Dog 20/20” on the “DGC Rarities: Volume 1” compilation and their moderately successful album, “Bandwagonesque,” Scottish band Teenage Fanclub inspired numerous artists on this list. Kurt Cobain called them the “best band in the world.”

32. The Beastie Boys — Formed way back in 1981, The Beastie Boys were originally a hardcore punk outfit, but switched over to hip hop in the mid-1980s, much to their benefit, as 1986’s “License to Ill” achieved critical success, selling 40 million albums worldwide. With seven albums reaching at least the platinum level in their career, the band was still going strong through 2011. Sadly, Adam “MCA” Yauch died of cancer in May 2012. The vote is out on whether Michael “Mike D” Diamond and Adam “Ad-Rock” Horovitz will release more music.

33. Alanis Morrisette — Although Alanis Morrisette didn’t have continued commercial success after her classic album, “Jagged Little Pill,” that offering alone sold more than 33 million copies worldwide, more than Counting Crows have sold their entire career! Maybe she should be number 32. In any case, Morrisette, at 21 years old at the time of the album’s release in 1995, became the youngest artist to win a Grammy for Album of the Year.

34. The White Stripes — The White Stripes need only two people to captivate thousands of people with their innovative, minimalist approach to song writing. Plus, their melody to the song “Seven Nation Army” is known to sports fan across the nation and probably the world.

35. Silverchair — A band right at home in grungeland with a wall of sound and a scratchy, growling lead singer to boot, this Australian artist jumped onto the scene with the 1995 release of “Frogstomp, with notable singles, “Tomorrow” and “Israel’s Son.” Band members were just 15 years old when the album was released. The band continued to release albums through 2007. Daniel Johns introduces the following performance with, “This is that grunge song:”

36. Incubus — On alternative rock mainstay, Incubus is on the short list of bands are still making music more than 20 years after forming.

37. Beck — Beck has utilized so many styles since his first album in the early 1990s, from rock, country, folk, pop, funk and rap, it’s hard to pigeon hole him into any one genre, and perhaps because of his versatility, his albums have continued drawing solid sales from a devoted fanbase.

38. The Cranberries — Behind the wistful voice of Dolores O’Riordan that recalls her native Ireland, The Cranberries have produced four albums that have made it to the top 20 on the Billboard 200 chart. The band, another mainstay in alternative rock, formed in 1990 and released its last album, “Roses,” in 2012. Their 1994 album, “No Need To Argue” is a study in musical contrast, from a soft, smoky sound to the thundering protest song, “Zombie.” This video accurately captures the album’s beautiful bleakness:

39. Counting Crows — Full disclosure, Counting Crows is one of my two favorite bands on this list, along with R.E.M. That being said, I think the band deserves to be in this part of the list because of their commercial success after the release of the singles “Mr Jones” and “Round Here” and the album, “August and Everything After,” along with the follow-up album, “Recovering the Satellites.” They are also one of the few bands on this list that was formed more than 20 years ago that’s still making music and touring. The band also gained mainstream success again with their original song, “Accidentally in Love,” which was on the “Shrek 2” soundtrack, and the Joni Mitchell cover, “Big Yellow Taxi,” which can still be heard in coffee shops across the country. Note: After more consideration, I actually dropped Counting Crows from number 32 to 39 because I felt The Beastie Boys should be higher on the list.

Top 50 alternative bands of all time: 40-50

These days, alternative music as a genre doesn’t have quite the same force as it once did. Most midsize towns that used to have dedicated alternative rock radio stations, where one could readily hear the latest from say, Ben Folds Five or the Gin Blossoms, either closed shop altogether or coalesced and transitioned into mainstream rock or some mix of mainstream and hard rock. Although many of the bands from the 1990s — and a handful from the 1980s — have continued making music, only a few of the major metro areas in the nation still have true alternative stations.

First, let’s take a look at what “alternative” actually means.

Wikipedia defines [[alternative rock]] this way:

The ‘alternative’ definition refers to the genre’s distinction from mainstream rock music, expressed primarily in a distorted guitar sound, transgressive lyrics and generally a nonchalant, defiant attitude. The term’s original meaning was broader, referring to a generation of musicians unified by their collective debt to either the musical style, or simply the independent, D.I.Y. ethos of punk rock, which in the late 1970s laid the groundwork for alternative music.

Music fans, particularly alternative music fans, will notice radio waves have few bands like Weezer, Bush or Stone Temple Pilots anymore, that is to say bands that use a lot of distorted guitars, driving rhythms and power chords. The culture seems to have changed, and as such, much of alternative today, with a few exceptions, could be more described as alt-pop. Although artists and bands like [[Lorde]], [[Chvches]], [[Of Monsters and Men]] and [[Foster the People]] maintain the off-the-beaten-path signature sound of alternative music, transgressiveness and to some degree, the defiance, the sound is more infused with keyboards, computer effects and experimental guitar techniques and chords. [[Muse]] is one of the few alternative bands in the modern era still producing the big rock sound reminiscent of bands in the 1990s, while still experimenting (See this video) and offering an alternative sound that’s different from the mainstream.

While this list is will be inevitably subjective, I am going to base it on some criteria and try to remove my personal preferences as best I can.

Here are the criteria on which I am basing this list:

  • Impact on the music industry and influence on other bands
  • Commercial and critical success
  • Longevity
  • Versatility

If this was a list of my personal favorite alternative bands of all time, for instance, Counting Crows and R.E.M. would probably be number one and two, respectively, along with a bunch of bands only a handful of people have heard of, like this list. But no, I’m going to try to keep it as objective as possible, with the understanding that subjectivity will inevitably creep in on any list like such as this. I can already think of a few bands that I absolutely cannot stand ([[Alice in Chains]] comes to mind), but that will and must be on the list because of their impact on the industry. I am also going to deduct points for bands that did not really stay truly within the alternative genre throughout their careers. For instance, U2 certainly had an alternative sound in the early 1980s, but quickly adopted, purposefully or not, more of a mainstream rock or adult rock sound by the mid- to late-1980s, carrying into the 1990s and 2000s.

The quintessential difference between alternative and the mainstream was best put in a review of Radiohead’s song “You and Whose Army” comparing Thom Yorke and Bono:

The lyrics, which seem to taunt authority into cracking down on the rabble, could have been given a completely different meaning had they been set to more triumphant music. (You can practically hear Bono delivering a song like this without a shred of irony). But here, Yorke sounds defeated, as if even he’s not confident that an insurgency would succeed.

That is alternative in a nutshell.

Without further adieu, here are picks 40-50:

40. Garbage — Sci-fi pop with a female kick and a wall of sound to boot, Garbage was widely influential in the mid-1990s. Although Garbage didn’t have much commercial success after its first two albums, the band still managed to sell more than 17 million albums worldwide.

41. The Killers — The Killers are one of the best bands of the 2000s, with four albums, “Hot Fuss,” “Sam’s Town,” “Day Age” and “Battle Born” reaching number one in England and Ireland, with “Sam’s Town” and “Hot Fuss” selling a total of 12 million units worldwide. The band has been nominated for seven Grammys and 24 NME awards.

42. Blur — All you need to know is “Whoo hoo!”

43. Everclear — Not one of my personal favorites, but more than deserving of being in the top 50.

44. Rage Against the Machine — No band spewed defiance with more punch than Rage.

45. The Pixies — Influencing countless bands through the years, The Pixies will forever be etched in alternative history for creating “the blueprint for alternative rock that would be followed and embellished upon by everyone from grunge to Britpop,” according to YouTube user iConcertsTelevision.

46. Dinosaur Jr. — Forming in 1984, Dinosaur Jr. has also influenced untold numbers of bands through the 30 years they have been playing music, although the band didn’t enjoy the commercial success of some of its successors.

47. The Church — Once described as “dense, shimmering, exquisite guitar pop,” while The Church also didn’t enjoy widespread commercial success, the band has a distinctive sound that makes them a must for any fan of alternative.

48. No Doubt. No doubt.

49. Mazzy Star — Mazzy Star’s 1994 song “Fade Into You” has been featured in more than 20 TV shows and movies. Enough said.

50. The Lemonheads — Again, not a personal fan, but The Lemonheads’ influence alone puts the band on the list.