This pick will come as no surprise to regular readers of the blog. I’ve gone on record calling this my favorite album and even featured it in its entirety a year and a half ago.

In fact, I’ve had to cheat in order to post a song today. This recording of ‘Alice Childress’ isn’t from the album itself but from a live radio performance by the band on KCRW. Fittingly, given yesterday’s featured album, Folds writes in the liner notes that he sang this song “absolutely intimidated by Fiona Apple’s performance on the same show.”

Ben Folds Five’s debut doesn’t have any of the thematic unity or dramatic production work that separates other albums in my 90’s top five. It sounds very much like what it is — a garage rock record banged out with no frills in record time. Just Folds on piano, Robert Sledge on bass, Darren Jesse on drums and microphones to capture all the wonderful noise they created.

This record bursts with creative energy and peerless musicianship. It captures the electricity of three musical savants in perfect sync fulfilling a shared vision. Folds wrote all of these songs but the contributions of Sledge and Jesse are essential, their intricate bass and drum parts as integral to each song’s success as the lead piano.

But of course, as always, it boils down to the songs. And Folds — right out of the gate — crafted some of the finest tunes of his career for this record. From sweetly sad ballads like ‘Boxing’ and today’s SOTD to the hilarious ‘Uncle Walter’ and ‘Underground’ and the epic showmanship of ‘Philosophy’ and ‘The Last Polka.’

Every song here is both perfect on its own and a perfect piece of the whole. To my ear, the album doesn’t contain a single misstep or wrong note — not musically, and not in the journey on which it takes the listener.

Nineteen other albums on this list might fall in a different position if I ran through this process again, but Ben Folds Five was cemented at the top spot before I even started.