Jamwise #48 - Best Albums of 1995

Featuring: Radiohead, PJ Harvey, Alanis Morisette, Oasis, Pulp, Pavement, Elliott Smith, 2Pac

I have to admit, after the ridiculously great response to the 1994 list and all the recommendations I got, it’s a little bit hard to move on to 1995. (make sure to check out the posts here and here - the comment sections are gold, Jerry, gold!)

As always, good citizens of the music-loving internet, I would love any and all album suggestions you have for the year 1995. Oh, did you think Jamwise was a free newsletter? Psssh, joke’s on you. I get paid for this in comments and recommendations, and business is BOOMING. *rolls around in a pile of music recommendations I’ve collected in a swimming pool*

Also, this time around I haven’t tried to only focus on my favorites, I’ve picked some albums that simply inspired me to write about them the most, some for good reasons, others for pure interest, others for… well, you’ll see. 1995 is another fun year of music, a time when changes seemed to be in the air - grunge was sort of ending, Britpop was taking off, G-funk was nearing its peak as the hip-hop cost war escalated, and I was learning to walk or chew solid food or whatever.

Project BAE - Best Albums Ever - 1995

The Bends - Radiohead

This newsletter is about self-growth through music. In that spirit, I’m starting off this week’s post with an exercise in self-growth. I don’t know how many times I’ve mentioned this (probably a lot), but I have… issues listening to Radiohead. There are many explanations for this, most of them related to personal preferences or connotations from my life that have nothing to do with the band’s music. Here’s hoping that listening through their discography chronologically will give me the perspective that seems to drive so many people to love their music.

Normally, my face looks pretty much like the dude on the front of this album while I’m listening to Radiohead. He looks like he’s totally over it, swimming in a sea of confusion and perplexed annoyance, unable to understand or summon the will to want to understand what he’s hearing, unsure if it’s even worth it to try. The internet has told him a billion billion times how amazing Radiohead is, how even their early albums are all-time greats, how they practically invented the internet or whatever the hell happened to make them megafamous (that’s a deep dive for another year).

And yet, in the spirit of being a good and open music listener, I’ve included Radiohead once again in a list of best albums. I know many think of the band that way. So as a way of growing musically and personally, I will be searching for and identifying greatness while listening to this album. If there is a fair way to approach music one might or might not dislike, I feel like that’s it in a nutshell. 

After a deep re-listen, I think this is my favorite Radiohead album, and that kind of makes me sad. It’s an intriguing promise of another great alt rock band that never really gets delivered, only deviated from - that’s the reason OK Computer and Kid A are so lauded, is it not? Because they deviated from this album’s sound so far? Radiohead took a promising, developing sound and threw it aside in favor of meandering experimentation that I have yet to enjoy despite years of trying.

This is Radiohead when they still sounded original to me, more than a thinly veiled mouthpiece for their various influences. It’s a promise of a talented alt-rock band that never materialized because they decided to pivot instead, and despite the fact that nobody seems to agree with this sentiment, I still see that decision as a tragedy. This album drops the meaningless whinyness of Pablo Honey, adds a more nuanced songwriting style, and achieves a pretty cohesive sound that fits right into the alt rock/britpop landscape. Was it an intriguing decision to deviate from that? Sure, and I’d watch the movie about the band’s career. But - and this is subject to change, as I’m trying to learn to change my mind when compelled - that cool factoid doesn’t have a bit of impact nowhere on the band’s future music, and therefore does nothing for me.

So while I enjoy The Bends on its own merits, it’s hard to actually listen to it for fun knowing that 1) the rest of the world thinks this is not the band’s ultimate form and 2) I dislike that ultimate form so strongly. The Radiohead story ending has been spoiled for me, and it’s hard to pretend I don’t know how the movie ends.

To Bring You My Love - PJ Harvey

A little bit of industrial sound enters PJ Harvey’s ever-changing musical vocabulary, and it freaking works. The music devolves at times to the level of almost ambient clanks and bangs of a construction site at night, but then she tosses in a driving guitar song like “C’mon Billy” that shatters the mood and shows you just how much musical range she really has.

PJ Harvey is like one of those lucky people who can learn any language and sound like a local in what seems like no time. Sure, that takes a ton of work, but there’s also a savvy understanding of the nuances of languages that not everybody has, and that’s the true skill that lets them listen and communicate without letting the language get in the way. It’s an ability to both learn academically and intuitively, and then to use that knowledge in a way that seems totally unforced to the outside world. That’s how PJ Harvey sounds to me, with all her musical exploration - explorations in different genres or sounds are just new languages to her, not the end goal, and you’re still getting PJ through the sound no matter what words or instruments or sounds she might be using. It’s hard for a novelist to sound like a local, but when they succeed, it’s a mark of genius.

I loved PJ Harvey’s debut, and I love this even more. There are some experimental sounding tracks that don’t capture me individually, but they are well-used as atmospheric breaks in the narrative of the album and don’t hurt anything, even for my plebian mind that doesn’t want to comprehend abstract music. I get excited for every PJ Harvey album I hear, and you can count on her making a return in this list many more times.

Jagged Little Pill - Alanis Morissette

Alanis Morissette has one of those sounds that you can’t plan or design or engineer, it just has to come authentically from of a talented artist. There’s a specifie attitude at play, and there’s a lot of influence from the mostly ending grunge movement of 1995 and her previous poppier works, but there’s also true creation here, something that sounds totally original to me. And the best part for Alanis is that it also happens to scratch that undefinable pop itch, with endlessly singable number one bangers that will probably last forever. 

If you listened to this album in a vacuum with no awareness of the charts or Alanis’ former electropop songs, you could reasonably argue it’s part of any number of different genres - rock, grunge, pure pop, alt rock. It’s the kind of album that seemingly hundreds of disparate artists can and should credit for inspiration. It’s angry in a self-aware way, poetic in a straightforward way, as oxymoronic at times as any of the dozen contrasting examples in “Hand In My Pocket” or “Ironic”

Also, cheers to a yodel that’s not overused - that’s refreshing after listening to Chappell Roan’s album recently where she sprinkles little yodels on every other syllable like a high school student using a new favorite word fifty times in an essay. 

Different Class - Pulp

Pulp’s fifth album sounds to me like part Bowie revival and part something new, as if they were Bowie superfans who wanted to make a version of his music that doesn’t sound like it was written by astral aristocracy to be handed down to us common humans. It’s all the best parts of Britpop with a little bit of a class war feeling (not too aggressive, very British and polite) that I dig. And it’s got one of the better lines out there, from “Mis-Shapes”: “We won’t use guns, we won’t use bombs, we’ll use the one thing we’ve got more of, and that’s our minds.” That one is especially relevant in 2024, 3 weeks before the most terrifying election of the century as of this writing.

Class differences are the main topic of exploration in the lead single “Common People,” and pervade the album. I’m reminded of the (in my opinion absolutely unwatchable) show Schitt’s Creek, where a bunch of formerly wealthy people are forced to live in a tiny town with no money. (If I have to hear someone say “ew, David!” one more time I’m gonna lose my mind. David is a great name, but this freaking show has relegated it to the level of Siri or Alexa that have been ruined in the popular group-mind). The show is meant to be funny, but it’s too real for me to laugh at sometimes - “Common People” explores this very same belief among the rich that they’re rich purely because of their own merits, the ridiculousness of that idea, and the fact that nobody can seem to escape it. We’re programmed to take credit for our successes, but the reality is we’re all out here working hard, man.

Anyways, Pulp is among my favorite of the Britpoppers, and was somehow a band I overlooked up to this point. But not anymore!

(What’s The Story) Morning Glory - Oasis

Oasis’ second album is another enjoyable but extremely overinflated album of bangers. It’s hard to get my feelings straight on Oasis - I love listening to their music, but it’s not a life changing experience for me like popular media in 2024 would have you think. It’s solid, if somewhat derivative-sounding, pop rock. There’s pretty much one guitar part in the band’s vocabulary that’s repurposed every song, rearranged slightly when they’re feeling extra creative. The lyrics aren’t much more varied, or at least they don’t feel that way from the delivery. My head would call this a soft 3/5, if it was in charge, but it’s not - my heart gives it a much higher rating and I can’t figure out why. 

Oasis reminds me of other bands like AC/DC (who I also love, for the record) who literally have one sound that they rearrange and play a dozen slightly varied ways on every album. Is Oasis the British AC/DC? If Bon Scott had grown up dealing with dreary weather and beans on toast rather than the scorpions and dust tornadoes and Fosters of his home country, would he have come out sounding like one of the Gallaghers? Would Angus Young have turned down his distortion and strummed his endlessly repeating power chords on an acoustic guitar instead of an overdriven SG? File that under another theory that’s just dumb enough to enrage the internet. Also I’ve never been to Australia but as a fellow former colony of Britain I feel like we both have the right to poke a little fun at our old pals/overlords. 

Sometimes simple sugars are what you’re craving, I suppose, and Oasis is the musical equivalent of a lollipop (sorry, a lolly). The enjoyment is part nostalgia, part simple head-nodding, part just letting your brain go to sleep to enjoy the gentle rush of music. It’s extremely British, and I say that as a neutral assessment, like saying my soup is salty - it’s something you might like or dislike. I like, but I also can’t say I’ve learned anything deep about life through Oasis’ music. A perplexing and enjoyable puzzle.

Wowee Zowee - Pavement

This album starts out Oasis clone and then goes pleasantly off the rails, venturing in all sorts of different directions. That strategy can go really well or really poorly, and although this album has some elements that I might normally dislike, like a lack of cohesion and a little bit of aimless wandering, I actually loved it in this setting. Maybe it’s because the sun was shining outside my open window as I listened to it, or maybe it’s just because the experimentation fits in perfectly with the rest of this week’s albums. Was experimentation just in the water in 1995? Was the music world trying to coalesce into the next big thing after the downfall of grunge and the commercialization of alt rock? I’d love to hear from someone who was there as this was all happening. OK I guess I was technically there, but my favorite songs in 1995 probably included the ABC song or “Wheels on the Bus”.

Elliott Smith - Elliott Smith

The gloomy, whispery, almost tortured sound of Elliot Smith feels unexpectedly current to me while listening in 2024. He’s got the bedroom pop sound nailed, the confession of one’s insecurities in a way that wouldn’t disturb one’s sleeping parents in the next room. His f-bombs on “Christian Brothers” sound like he’s been looking forward to each and every one of them, building up the F sound like it’s the first time he’s ever said the word, emphasizing his discontent so the adults will listen - and that might be the single best way to summarize his sound. 

I can’t say this album was the most musically inspiring for me, but Elliott Smith was an artist I was completely unfamiliar with, and that was enough reason to explore it on its own. This seems to be another album that has been reviewed more positively in memory than at the time - I need to listen to some more Smith to really get where it fits into his discography, and I intend to do so. 

The best part is the folk atmosphere in my opinion - Smith used interesting chord changes as his major ornamentation, and the music goes unexpected places as a result. Most of the surprises are small ones, but that’s enough, as his music seems to shine from simplicity rather than decoration. It’s still a little petulant for me, but I can respect it.

Me Against The World - 2pac

Digging into the genres of hip-hop that were blossoming in the mid 90’s has been a total joy. This album lies somewhere between boom-bap and G-funk, the latter being a new favorite of mine, and 2Pac was one of the best of both worlds. From his interest in poetry to his legendary death, Tupac Shakur was a force of nature, and this album is a raw insight into his life both in and out of the public eye.

My favorite parts of this album are the existential explorations, questions about life and death, that show how deeply intelligent Tupac was. There are so many layers to unpack it’s impossible to do without having the lyrics in front of you like a book. This is widely considered one of hip-hop’s greatest albums ever, and it’s easy to see why.