Sort by Date

I've been in the mood all day for sappy '90s indie rock. I listened through this list, but it wasn't enough. So I decided to see what albums I had that I could put on. Toward this end, I went to my player and sorted my album list by date.

My mind was immediately blown. In the decade or so that I've been using QL, I don't think I've ever sorted my albums by date. I suddenly found that all these albums which had occupied completely different spaces in my head were right next to each other.

So, I've decided to scroll through my collection and point out any sets of albums whose temporal proximity strikes me as surprising, interesting, or odd.

• 1979: The Clash's London Calling and Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures.
• Seminal punk and post-punk albums, although obviously both those labels can be debated.
• 1991: My Bloody Valentine's Loveless, Nirvana's Nevermind, Temple of the Dog's Temple of the Dog.
• The start of so many different trends in rock music.
• 1992: Pharcyde's Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde, Dr. Dre's The Chronic, Beastie Boys' Check Your Head.
• The early nineties had a vibrancy in hip hop that we probably didn't see again until the early '10s.
• 1994: Green Day's Dookie, Pavement's Crooked Raid, Crooked Rain, Cake's Motorcade of Generosity, The Mountain Goats' Zapilote Machine.
• Just weird for me to think that Cake and Green Day basically started out in the same year, although to be fair Dookie was huge in '94, and Motorcade didn't really hit it big until '95. Still, two bands I'd never think of as being listened to in the same time or place. Fun note, The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets released their first album (on cassette), Cthulhuriffomania! this year.
• 1995: Ani DiFranco's Not a Pretty Girl, Radiohead's The Bends.
• An album I love and one that apparently everyone else loves. But again, just two albums that I would never think of as coming from the same year; not that they evince any particular style which makes them unlikely to be contemporaries, but it's almost like there are two different histories of music, and each fits into a completely disjoint one.
• 1996: De La Soul's Stakes is High, Belle & Sebastian's Tigermilk & If You're Feeling Sinister, Beck's Odelay.
• Almost too many albums from this year to really pick. Belle & Sebastian put these two masterpieces out within six months of each other, while De La Soul and Beck each produced probably their finest albums as well. Honorable mention goes to Dar Williams's Mortal City, Weezer's Pinkerton, Beastie Boys' The In Sound From Way Out, Cibo Matto's Viva! La Woman, and Silkworm's Firewater.
• 1998: Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Pearl Jam's Yield.
• Though I love Pearl Jam, they've never been innovative or particularly musically daring. And Yield, while a brilliant refinement of their style, doesn't exactly move the state of pop music forward very far.
• 2001: System of a Down's Toxicity, Tool's Lateralus.
• Tool have always been in their own little world of massively popular metal, a world a few tiers above that occupied by System of a Down.
• 2003: The Dresden Dolls' The Dresden Dolls, Canibus's Rip the Jacker, Mars Volta's De-Loused in the Comatorium.
• Again, three albums that I do not for a second imagine as existing in the same metaphorical space, despite having listened to each countless times. (Also, today is the first time I have noticed that it is, in fact, "Comatorium" and not "Crematorium".)
• 2004: Franz Ferdinand's Franz Ferdinand, Death From Above 1979's You're a Woman, I'm a Machine.
• Franz Ferdinand seem unable to escape from their moment; DFA remain timeless, however. It's probably the noise.
• 2008: Girl Talk's Feed the Animals, DJ Shadow & Cut Chemist's The Hard Sell (Encore).
• Two completely different takes on sampling and mashups, each brilliant in its own way.

I think any further and things are too fresh, too familiar to notice anything interesting. Maybe none of my comments make sense. I've been up for 22 hours at this point. I should probably just re-sort my albums by artist.

P.S. I ended up listening to the Breeders.