Twenty Favorite Albums of the 1990s
(In one of my usual fits of obsessive pointlessness, I filled out Pitchfork’s readers’ poll to determine the best albums of the 1990s. Crowd-sourced lists such as this are normative by design, and the results are almost always pedestrian, but I couldn’t help myself. I’ve marked the albums that I think might actually have a shot at making their aggregated top 150 with an asterisk. I’ll bold the ones that actually do.)
- Iris DeMent: My Life 
- Talk Talk: Laughing Stock * [#33] 
- The Divine Comedy: Promenade 
- Sinéad O’Connor: I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got * [#127] 
- Luxuria: Beast Box 
- Time Machines: Time Machines 
- Robyn Hitchcock: Eye 
- Ryoji Ikeda: +/- 
- James: Laid * 
- Richard Shindell: Sparrows Point 
- Tindersticks: The First Tindersticks Album * 
- Greg Brown: Dream Cafe 
- Björk: Homogenic * [#6] 
- Depeche Mode: Violator * [#136] 
- Sidsel Endresen and Bugge Wesseltoft: Duplex Ride 
- Lewis Taylor: Lewis Taylor 
- The Sundays: Reading, Writing and Arithmetic * 
- David Massengill: Coming Up for Air 
- Maxwell: Maxwell's Urban Hang Suite * [#130] 
- System Error: Nothing 
— September 14, 2022