The payoff was buried in the hidden tracks on the CD version: “Car Wash Hair,” a Dean Wareham-assisted love song that was lucid and sensual. There’s beauty and majesty throughout, presaging the more accessible sound of Deserter’s Songs, but it’s often undercut with ugliness or twisted into disturbing shapes. The success of grunge sent shockwaves through the music industry as A&R reps found an opening to help some truly oddball bands get major label money-all with the promise that they had found “the next Nirvana.” How then to explain the arrival of Yerself Is Steam on Columbia Records four months before Nevermind? The debut album from Buffalo, New York band Mercury Rev is an uncompromising slab of neo-psychedelia, with guitar feedback and devastating volume that gush like a waterfall over spiraling flute melodies and the freeform poetic squeaks and groans of vocalist David Baker. Its New York no-wave and art-rock inspirations are made clear, distancing itself from the more conventional rock releases of the time and creating one of the most poignant feminist works alongside the likes of Patti Smith and Sylvia Plath. Although Love has distanced herself from the record, it still holds up as an uncompromising look into pain disguised as abrasive noise with a beauty resting underneath that Love, or rather the album’s unnamed narrator, cannot see. Love’s dissections of womanhood are beautifully disgusting as they come together like a haunted Victorian painting, or rather a postmodern feminist critique that is as bleak as it is profound. Hole: Pretty on the InsideĬourtney Love is one of the most reviled figures in music, a conversation that does not leave much room for her compelling artistry as lead singer and rhythm guitarist of Hole. The Paste staff and writers has looked back 30 years and voted on our 30 favorite albums of 1991. And several bands proved you didn’t need a big budget or radio airplay to produce amazing music. were making the most of their newfound superstardom.
My Bloody Valentine and A Tribe Called Quest both released their masterpieces. It wasn’t until the following year when several singles took off that record label execs were trying to sign every grunge-adjacent act in America, and Weird Al was singing, “It’s hard to bargle nawdle zouss/With all these marbles in my mouth.” But there was plenty of other great music to be found as the 1990s began to take shape. We think of 1991 as the year when the Seattle scene and its grunge phenomenon took over the rock world, but neither Pearl Jam’s Ten nor Nirvana’s Nevermind were immediate hits.