Continuing a countdown of my favorite albums of 1995…
#5 – Garbage – Garbage
This album might be the most 1995 record on my list of 1995 records. Garbage’s sound — alternative rock with a side of grunge — had its heyday in the middle of that decade.
And I’m not sure anybody did it better than this unlikely quartet, made up of three male American record producers and a mesmerizing Scottish female lead singer.
The week of May 22, 2004, found Usher in a familiar place on top of the Billboard Hot 100.
When Usher was named the headliner of this year’s Super Bowl halftime show, I was underwhelmed. But I guess that’s because I wasn’t paying much attention in the early 2000s when he was churning out hits faster than the charts could process them.
Consider that ‘Burn’ replaced Usher’s own ‘Yeah!’ at #1 and was later dislodged from the top spot by ‘Confessions Part II,’ another Usher track.
Throwing back to the week of May 21, 1994, we find the R&B band All-4-One atop the Billboard Hot 100 with their sole #1 hit, ‘I Swear.’
This song was first released five months earlier as the lead single of country singer John Michael Montgomery’s album Kickin’ It Up. That recording spent a month at #1 on the country chart, and made it to #42 on the Hot 100.
Continuing a countdown of my favorite albums of 1995…
#6 – Elliott Smith – Elliott Smith
This is another album I circled back to after discovering the artist a few years down the road. In this case, I first heard Elliott Smith’s 1998 album XO before picking up the three that preceded it.
This self-titled release was Smith’s sophomore effort, and his first on the Kill Rock Stars label. It carried over the lo-fi acoustic style of his debut — the sound most people associate with Smith, though his music was much more produced on future releases.
Continuing a countdown of my favorite albums of 1995…
#7 – What’s the Story (Morning Glory)? – Oasis
The sophomore release by British indie rockers Oasis is a Britpop touchstone and one of history’s best-selling albums worldwide. For a brief period, Oasis was the biggest thing in the UK since The Beatles (though brothers Noel and Liam Gallagher were a much pricklier duo than Lennon and McCartney).
Meet Me In Montauk 