Unplugged in New York
Nirvana - 1994

Rock still lives in Nirvana's shadow. Nirvana rocked harder, louder, with more raw emotion and energy than any of their contemporaries or clones. But what made Nirvana special was the delicate, haunted pain of Kurt Cobain. Here, stripped of the safety of Nirvana's new-wave punk sound, we can hear the heaviest band of the 1990s in all their fragile beauty.

Achtung Baby!
U2 - 1992

New Year's Eve 1989, U2-- the band of the 80s -- said they were leaving to dream it all up again. They disappeared to Berlin of all places to muse on the dark sides of love and almost break up. When they emerged in '92 they brought Achtung! -- a post-modern masterpiece, as much about alienation and confusion in a changing world as the 90s themselves were.

Exile in Guyville
Liz Phair - 1993

Phair recorded this song-for-song reply to the Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street on a four track tape player in her Chicago apartment. The DIY feel only adds to the album's ambience. If U2 painted a picture of life in the 90s in broad, expressionistic strokes, Phair does it with subtle, witty, tragic observations.

Ladies and Gentlemen, We Are Floating In Space
Spiritualized - 1997

This album was originally released packaged like a prescription drug: even the packaging was in on what makes this trance album so entrancing. Drug use and rock have always been married, but no one has ever made the two seem so much like the same thing as Spiritalized. The aural equivalent of a heroin trip, when Jason Pierce's endless refrain of "All I want's a little bit of love to take the pain away" lilts you into pure white noise, you can almost feel the needle in your arm.

Fumbling Towards Ecstasy
Sarah McLachlan - 1993

To paraphrase my friend Blake Rome, "just listen to it." McLachlan's breakthrough album is one of the most brilliantly arranged, recorded, sung, and produced albums ever to come out of Canada or anywhere else. Simply dripping with emotion, McLachlan's soundscape proves that girls can delve into the heart of darkness too.