To compare the number of UK acts finishing here versus the last three years speaks to how quickly the new order that wasn’t New Order rewrote the modern rock/college charts. 1993 was the last time oddities like, say, The Cure’s “Burn,” Kate Bush’s “Eat the Music,” and New Order’s “World” would share space with “Cannonball,” “Feed the Tree” and its heirs — and, as Chris O’Leary has exhaustively chronicled, “Feed the Tree” was an anomaly too. The beneficiary of the last gasp of WTF-ness, Pet Shop Boys watched as Very get their best-ever American reviews, highest chart placement since 1986, and earned a gold album, after which they disappeared because they were too pop and gay and dance-y for college radio and too British for American radio. You wanna talk about radio segregation? It’s possible “modern rock”-reporting stations needed to compensate for David J scoring as recently as 1990, but as the British charts coughed up Suede, Tricky, Massive Attack, Blur, and, cough, Oasis, we saw Presidents of the United States triumph.
A conversation for another time.
Meh
John Hiatt – Perfectly Good Guitar
Paul Westerberg – 14 Songs
Sound, Solid
PJ Harvey – 4-Track Demos
Dwight Yoakam – This Time
Tony Toni Toné – Sons of Soul
Sade – Love Deluxe
Cypress Hill – Black Sunday
Willie Nelson – Across the Borderline
Rosanne Cash – The Wheel
Aimee Mann – Whatever
Bettie Serveert – Palomine
Urge Overkill – Saturation
Bob Dylan – World Gone Wrong
Good to Great
Sananda Maitreya – Symphony or Damn
De La Soul – Buhloone Mindstate
Stereolab – Transient Random-Noise Bursts With Announcements
U2 – Zooropa
Pet Shop Boys – Very
Liz Phair – Exile in Guyville
The Breeders – Last Splash
PJ Harvey – Rid of Me
A Tribe Called Quest – Midnight Marauders
Digable Planets – Reachin’ (A New Refutation of Time and Space)
Belly – Star
P.M. Dawn: The Bliss Album…?
Nirvana – In Utero
Dr. Dre – The Chronic
Yo La Tengo – Painful
The Afghan Whigs – Gentlemen
Me’Shell NdegéOcello – Plantation Lullabies
Smashing Pumpkins – Siamese Dream
The Jury’s Out
Cassandra Wilson: Blue Light ‘Til Dawn
Arthur Alexander: Lonely Just Like Me
Jane Siberry – When I Was a Boy
Humanizing The Vacuum 