Usher Discography 1994 2010 6 Albums
Orville Marquez
The soundtrack to The Crow was 1994's most effective gateway drug: Taken to Number One by Stone Temple Pilots' ubiquitous modern rock staple "Big Empty," the soundtrack ripped the flannel off millions of alterna-teens, sealed them in black vinyl and minted a new generation of goths. Pantera, Nine Inch Nails and Rollins Band laid their influences bare, covering late-Seventies/early-Eighties alt-icons like Poison Idea, Joy Division and Suicide, shoving new fans down a pre-blog rabbit hole of discovery. And in the days when albums didn't leak and hunting for B-sides was a sport, The Crow was a treasure trove: Rare one-offs from the Cure, Violent Femmes and Rage Against the Machine; a pre-album look at new music from Helmet; and a quick industrial education via Machines of Loving Grace and My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult. Tom Mallon
What was the elevator pitch for these guys? Slam-poet, pulp fiction enthusiast, and occasional rock critic from the downtown NYC avant-jazz scene teams with a heavy cocktail-funk rhythm section and a sampler player prone to bursts of Ren & Stimpy's favorite composer, Raymond Scott. Oh yeah, and producer Tchad Blake is gonna run the vocals through mufflers and bullhorns sometimes. If leader Mike Doughty's memoir, The Book of Drugs, is to be believed, then his bandmates were musically gifted egomaniacs whose quirks kept him from making the songs he wanted to hear. But maybe it was that very friction that made Ruby Vroom an unlikely hit. Christopher R. Weingarten
Corrosion of Conformity have always been scene-hoppers, starting life as a hardcore band in 1983, becoming a groove-minded Sabbath-gone-thrash hybrid by 1991's Blind, and riding the crest of alternative to commercial success for 1994's Deliverance. Sure, the record as a whole was a big toke of stoner metal, but thanks to frontman Pepper Keenan's Muppet-like snarl and a singles with radio-friendly guitar lines that sounded like Stone Temple Pilots in reverse ("Clean My Wounds") or Pearl Jam on 'ludes ("Albatross"), the group finally broke. The album's non-metal legacy stretched a lot farther than the band, whose popularity petered out after releasing the more metal-focused follow-up Wiseblood in 1996. Deliverance B-side "Big Problems" made it onto the Clerks soundtrack and the interlude "Mano de Mono" and opening track "Heaven's Not Overflowing" got placement in Robert De Niro and Michele Pfeiffer movies, respectively. Kory Grow
In the days before file sharing, odds 'n' sods comps were the ultimate in fan service. Between their numerous B-sides, EPs, and compilation cuts, Smashing Pumpkins had enough material to release a rarities collection a mere two albums into their career, and, as Rolling Stone declared upon its release, "It's better than a lot of albums that bands labored hard to put together." This pile of songs cohered because of Billy Corgan's musical vision being squarely at its center, though there are a few clear standouts. "Starla" is an 11-minute opus of guitar pyrotechnics, and "La Dolly Vita," which originally appeared on the Pumpkins' contribution to the Sub Pop Singles Club (which the band recorded the day they met Butch Vig) begins placidly then opens up into a pummeling coda. Maura Johnston
As if a major-label deal floating towards a hardcore punk band in their 14th year wasn't unlikely enough, Bad Religion's Stranger Than Fiction somehow united Rancid's Tim Armstrong (he duets on furious lambaste "Television"), Pirates of the Caribbean director Gore Verbinski (he directed the video for "21st Century [Digital Boy]") , and CHiPs cop Erik Estrada (he cameos in the clip for the hook-filled, sinister "Infected."). Following seven records on guitarist Brett Gurewitz's indie stronghold Epitaph, the Los Angeles veterans released their venomous Atlantic Records debut, a Taser-proof preview for the end time and home of their three highest-charting Modern Rock singles. Even if life is the crummiest book Ph.D.-holding frontman Greg Graffin ever read, he absorbed enough to make these rants feel awfully cathartic. Reed Fischer
Many indie trailblazers of the Eighties grew embittered as Nineties alt-rock youngsters eclipsed them commercially. But Bob Mould was inspired by these newer bands, particularly My Bloody Valentine, and he formed a new power trio dedicated to yoking the transcendent noise of their Loveless to the concise pop-punk he pioneered with Hsker D. Mould's obsessive attention to detail (he scrapped the initial sessions and started from scratch) paid off in the enormous yet nimble guitar sound he captured, all muscular jangle, hydraulic pulls and a reminder that you can only call them "hooks" when they draw blood. We'd heard the power and thrust of Mould's guitar before, but not its three-dimensional electronic nature. This time we got not just the burst of the bottle rocket, but the vast twinkling of its afterglow. The results made Hsker D LPs sound like field recordings. Keith Harris
"I'm into just doing all kinds of things," Frank Black told an interviewer who'd asked a question about the "sprawling" sound of second solo album Teenager of the Year. "People get bent out of shape when someone that isn't country tries to do country, or someone that's country tries to do rock." After the Pixies broke up, the former Black Francis reinvented himself as an eclectic L.A. rocker with a wry view of the alt-rock scene he'd helped invent. The 22-song double-album Teenager of the Year produced a minor hit in "Headache," and Pere Ubu keyboardist Eric Drew Feldman helped Black get a spacey sound that incorporates everything from ska to vintage rock & roll to surf-pop to punk. The best moment is "Freedom Rock," a biting yet loving song about an alterna-dude that's worthy of Randy Newman: "My name is Chip and I'm different/I don't conform/I wear a different uniform," Francis sings, before adding what might be a maxim for the album's freewheeling spirit: "Nobody owns the pleasure of tones." Jon Dolan
Weight wasn't beat poetry, it was beat-down poetry. A decade after Henry Rollins made his spoken-word debut on Black Flag's hodgepodge Family Man, his heavily slammed verses on the 1994 track "Liar" became an alt-rock staple, crashing the MTV Buzz Bin with screams of "Hahahaha, sucker!" In the seven years since Rollins formed his eponymous band, the group had evolved into a jazz-metal hybrid with tight grooves that could either play it cool or sizzle and seethe along with him as he preached about being an individual ("Disconnect"), pondered sexism ("Wrong Man") or condemned gun culture ("Civilized"). Though it was a hit at the time, Rollins did not expect his newfound mainstream popularity to last long. "When everyone who is now 18 turns 40, they're not going to be saying 'Oh, Henry Rollins,'" he told Rolling Stone in 1993. "They're going to be saying, 'Oh, Eddie. Oh, Kurt.' That's the way it is." Kory Grow
Helmet made rhythmically complex, steely-riffed alterna-metal that punished your body from odd angles (when forming, they placed an ad in The Village Voice searching for an "asexual bass player"). Touted as the "next Nirvana," their 1992's Interscope debut Meantime made the New Yorkers the most successful band to come out of the thuggy, noise-cretin Amphetamine Reptile scene; and while Betty wasn't as immediately exciting as its predecessor, it spun their sound into jazz, blues and improv, challenging their art-jock fanbase ("Beautiful Love" begins as a Brazilian guitar piece then explodes into abstract free-rock jamming). They still managed to score a minor modern rock hit with "Milquetoast" and deliver one of the year's truly crushing major label rock albums. Jon Dolan
Like a Britpop Dr. Dre, guitarist-songwriter Noel Gallagher made multi-platinum pop by liberally lifting recognizable hooks from his heroes. On Oasis' brash and noisy debut, Definitely Maybe, bits from the Beatles and the Jam ranged from affectionate ("Live Forever" was inspired by the Stones' "Shine a Light") to the obvious ("Cigarettes and Alcohol" bangs T. Rex's gong pretty heavily), to the potentially illegal (the repurposing of a Coca-Cola jingle for the infectious "Shakermaker" sparked a lawsuit). Impressively, Noel and bratty lead singer bro Liam's dust-ups with each other (and Blur) didn't bleed into pessimistic songs, and "Live Forever" turned out as jangly an antidote to Nirvana's dourness of the day as any. (You wouldn't know it from Liam's funeral-face performance style, though.) Production-wise, Definitely Maybe's semi-botched studio sessions yielded rough-edged, mid-fi salvage miracles replete with fuzz, studio banter and an alertness they've tried (and failed) to recreate ever since. Reed Fischer
For American Anglophiles, it was wonderful being in a neutral country during the great Oasis/Blur wars of 1995. The proper warm-up for Team Blur was 1994's Parklife: All snot-nosed, neo-mod, track-jacket guitar-pop proudly in the tradition of the Kinks, the Jam and anything ever described as "cheeky." Conceived by Damon Albarn as a concept album a bit like Martin Amis' novel London Fields (its working title was "London"), Parklife was a zippy reminder that middle class didn't necessarily mean middle-brow. In spite of four hit-in-England singles (and one minor U.S. hit with "Girls & Boys"), Pulp went on to do all of this about a billion times better the following year on Different Class. Still, it's one of the most London-y albums that ever Londoned. Joe Gross
Thanks to the promotional efforts of Nirvana, who'd covered three 1984 Meat Puppets songs with brothers Curt and Chris Kirkwood in their MTV Unplugged set the previous fall, Too High to Die is the only gold album of these brain-dusted desert rats' long career; Top 50 single "Backwater" would be the biggest Neil Young hit since "Old Man" if it was one, which it almost is. But Too High is of a piece with their whole three-decade catalog: two-step mirages ("We Don't Exist"), Appalachian spirituals ("Comin' Down"), white blues ("Roof With A Hole"), surf twang ("Evil Love"), Oktoberfest oompah ("Station"), Marshall Tucker cowboy choogle ("Flaming Heart") and classic rock shuffles (check the Cheap Trick and Blue yster Cult echoes in "Things"). And if you need more roots clues, the album's promo singles featured covers of Marty Robbins' border-country "El Paso City" and Arizona anarcho-punk brats the Feederz' "Fuck You." Chuck Eddy
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