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The 10 Best Albums of 1994

These are the best albums of 1994 as selected by Slant’s music writers.

The 10 Best Albums of 1994

In my introduction to Slant’s list of the 100 Best Albums of the 1990s, I described nostalgia for the decade as “an idealized vision of a time when Bill Clinton was the fresh, young Democrat on the block, beepers were the hottest new tech items, and every major record label and Top 40 radio station was scrambling to discover the next big alternative to run-of-the-mill pop.” I went on to lament: “It’s human nature to look back on things with irrational fondness and nostalgia, overlooking the bad and romanticizing the good. But while the ’90s had its fair share of ‘crap,’ it’s hard to deny that the ‘good’ was exceptionally good.” So good, in fact, that we decided to dust off our lovingly curated list of over 400 albums to compile individual Top 10s for each year of the ’90s. Many of these titles are already widely—and rightfully—celebrated, but these lists also give us the opportunity to honor some typically overlooked gems. Sal Cinquemani

Honorable Mention: Madonna, Bedtime Stories; Deee-Lite, Dewdrops in the Garden; Nirvana, MTV Unplugged in New York; Beastie Boys, Ill Communication; Underworld, Dubnobasswithmyheadman; R.E.M., Monster; Soundgarden, Superunknown; Massive Attack, Protection; Sinéad O’Connor, Universal Mother; Tori Amos, Under the Pink


The 10 Best Albums of 1994

10. Beck, Mellow Gold

The 12 tracks that proved Beck wasn’t a one-hit loser, Mellow Gold is a curiously dark album from an artist who had not yet completely established his weird-cool credentials. The song that put Beck on the map almost seems like an afterthought when compared with the rest of Mellow Gold’s bizarre and, at times, nightmarish, alterna-rap-folk brilliance. Gliding effortlessly from grisly, pitch-bending hip-hop (“Soul Suckin’ Jerk”) to slacker pop adventure (“Beercan”) to gorgeously surreal tragedy (“Blackhole”), Beck confidently stepped out from the shadow of the “Loser” label and gave us a preview of his inventive, genre-mashing artistry to come. Kevin Liedel


The 10 Best Albums of 1994

9. Blur, Parklife

If Pulp was Brit-pop’s loveable lechers and Oasis was the cadging, sour romantics, then Blur was the resident humanists, finding time for droll character sketches that retained a beneficent compassion toward their subjects. Their first big album, Parklife, is also their most thorough examination of mass idiosyncrasy, from the urban pastoral observations of the title track to the working-class escape of “Bank Holiday” to the sexual populism of “Girls and Boys.” As a collection of portraits, the album seems like a younger cousin to the Kinks’s Village Green Preservation Society, a classic portrayal that’s resolutely English but also broadly universal. Jesse Cataldo


The 10 Best Albums of 1994

8. Pavement, Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain

Perpetually trapped in the long shadow of Slanted and Enchanted, Pavement’s second album doesn’t have the surprising punch of the first, but its chops are equally solid, stuffed with memorable melodies and off-kilter humor. Dropping wild drummer Gary Young and the fuzzy sound that dominated the first album may have seemed like an attempt to erase their roots, but casting off these distractions ended up throwing the band’s structure into sharper relief. Astute enough to pull off an aural joke like “5-4=Unity,” an off-time tribute to Dave Brubeck’s “Take 5” that’s also a splendid song on its own, the album effortlessly highlights the band’s musicianship and brains. Cataldo

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The 10 Best Albums of 1994

7. Nine Inch Nails, The Downward Spiral

What can be said of Trent Reznor’s industrial odyssey that isn’t gleaned from the monstrous presence of “Closer”? Though “Hurt” went on to receive a second life in America’s mainstream music consciousness and “March of the Pigs” is ultimately a more interesting track, “Closer” is The Downward Spiral in six awesomely frightening minutes: intuitive, conceptual, highly self-aware, and a perfect slice of beat-driven horror music with a brain to go with its lumbering limbs. With Nine Inch Nails’s sophomore effort, Reznor proved that he had an ear for hitting the space between the extremes, balancing melody and erosion, hooks and white noise, ecstasy and dread. The Downward Spiral is nightmare and dream as one: at times inspiring but almost always scary as hell. Liedel


The 10 Best Albums of 1994

6. Hole, Live Through This

Released one week after Kurt Cobain’s suicide, Live Through This is an advertisement of Courtney Love’s bald-faced punk ambition—which explains, though only in part, the offensive, still-persisting rumors that Cobain co-wrote the songs. It didn’t help that he was a remarkably allusive and sensitive lyricist, and that the songs on Live Through This are among rock’s, well, most allusive and sensitive. But these are not the rants of a self-proclaimed feminist, but those of an actual woman, voraciously hungry for attention, impossibly obsessed with her image, unbearably self-doubting, and capable of unexpected compassion. The album’s fabulously deranged tapestry of metaphors and similes are inextricably tied to a very female-centic sense of suffering, and their meaning is made lucid not by Love’s less-than-surprising guitaring, but by her beyond-exceptional range of feeling. This harpy will fuck you, kill you, cut herself, then cry over the pieces of flesh she holds in her hands, but she will never lie to you. Ed Gonzalez


The 10 Best Albums of 1994

5. Weezer, Weezer

“My name is Jonas,” Rivers Cuomo chokes out in the first few seconds of the so-called “Blue Album,” and hence begins our dive into the lovably nerdy, garage-dwelling world of Weezer. Before Cuomo the Creep fantasized about underage Japanese girls writing him fan letters or Cuomo the Hack recycled old ideas into paeans to Hollywood, Cuomo the Geek was crooning in quirky self-deprecation about his 12-sided die, his love of surfing, and of course, his Buddy Holly glasses. Backing him was an equally endearing dork fellowship that somehow managed to deftly channel influences as disparate as the Beach Boys, KISS, and the Cars into one of the most fascinating and catchy rock debuts of the decade. The Blue Album turned out to be Weezer’s best moment, wonderfully capturing geeky, escapist memes years before the Internet ever got its hands on nerd-dom. Liedel


The 10 Best Albums of 1994

4. The Notorious B.I.G., Ready to Die

The reason why 2Pac’s name has shriveled while Biggie’s continues to grow more mythical boils down to a host of factors, but it’s not a stretch to place the reason on this stellar debut. Life After Death may be certified diamond, but its monolithic length and scattershot quality signal a significant drop-off. The real treasure is this, an album so grandly attuned to the bleak voice of this inimitable rapper, as much fixated on the end of his life as the living of it, so much that his tragic demise seemed less of a shock than the fulfillment of a prophecy. Cataldo

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The 10 Best Albums of 1994

3. Nas, Illmatic

Listening to Illmatic today drives home nothing so clearly as the futility of opposing gangsta rap to “conscious” hip-hop. Cartoonish mafioso figures and self-serious street preachers have set much of the agenda for mainstream hip-hop and its underground reactionaries, but on Illmatic, Nas provides a gritty chronicle of life in the Queensbridge projects that indulges neither nihilism nor socio-political grandstanding. On songs like “Memory Lane” and “It Ain’t Hard to Tell,” he confronts the hopelessness of the ghetto with ancient wisdom and modernist style, referencing jazz, gang life, and Eastern religion in his knotty, cerebral flows. And three of the album’s four producers—DJ Premier, Q-Tip, and Pete Rock—have become hip-hop legends, and they deserve their prestige on the strength of Illmatic’s dense, melodic arrangements alone. Matthew Cole


The 10 Best Albums of 1994

2. Portishead, Dummy

In the wake of its dramatic, sinister follow-up, Portishead, and the stark, often dissonant Third, it’s easy to forget just how lush, unassuming, even gentle Portishead’s debut was. Even “Nobody loves me, it’s true!,” the hook of the album’s biggest hit, “Sour Times,” is less histrionic than it first seems, resolving with an expectedly calm and collected “…not like you do.” A mix of tortured torch songs and noirish soundscapes in which Hammond organ, theremin, brass, hip-hop loops, and turntable scratches all figure prominently, Geoff Barrow and Beth Gibbons drew on a century of popular music—from the Velvet Underground to John Barry, from blues to jazz—to create an album that sounds at once vintage, modern, and timeless, and like nothing anyone had ever heard before. Cinquemani


The 10 Best Albums of 1994

1. Jeff Buckley, Grace

Take one part Nina Simone and one part Frank Sinatra, marry them with the precise but unabashed roar of a Zeppelin record and the scrappiness of a folk-punk troubadour and you might start to come close to describing Jeff Buckley’s music. Sometimes frightening, sometimes soothing, but always invariably sexy, his was a voice that, emerging in the wake of the pitch-imperfection of grunge’s most famous screamers, seemed remarkable in both its precision and purpose. It’s why he was able to make Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” and the ghostly English hymn “Corpus Christi Carol” his own, and his originals, like “Last Goodbye” and “Lover, You Should Have Come Over,” songs that only he could sing. Cinquemani

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