The Most Embarrassing Concert T-Shirts I Owned in the 90s, Ranked from Bad to Worse
Look, we’ve all made fashion choices we regret. But as a professional music journalist who spent the 90s convinced his credibility was directly proportional to...
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HammerFall’s ‘Glory to the Brave’: The Album That Revived Traditional Metal When Nobody Wanted It
I still have the exact moment burned into my memory—standing in Amoeba Records in San Francisco, sometime in the summer of ’97, flipping through the...
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In Flames’ ‘The Jester Race’: When Swedish Death Metal Got Melodic and Accessible
I first heard In Flames’ “The Jester Race” in the most clichéd way possible: at three in the morning in a dingy apartment, passed to...
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System of a Down’s ‘Toxicity’: Nu-Metal for People Who Hated Nu-Metal
I have a specific memory from 2001 that perfectly encapsulates what made System of a Down’s “Toxicity” such a game-changing album. I was at The...
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Sublime’s ‘Sublime’: The Posthumous Classic That Defined California Hybrid Rock
July 1996. I was sitting in the offices of Riff Raider, sorting through the week’s new releases, when I pulled out Sublime’s self-titled album. The...
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Soundgarden’s ‘Down on the Upside’: The Underrated Swan Song Before Their Long Hiatus
May 1996. I was sitting in my apartment, windows open to catch the spring breeze, spinning Soundgarden’s just-released “Down on the Upside” for the third...
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The Smashing Pumpkins’ ‘Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness’: The Last Great Double Album of the CD Era
The first time I heard “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness,” I was sitting in the back room of Wax Trax Records in Chicago, October...
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Rancid’s ‘…And Out Come the Wolves’: When 90s Punk Got Ska Rhythms and Mohawk Authenticity
August 1995. I was crashing on a friend’s couch in Berkeley, ostensibly researching a piece about the East Bay punk scene for Riff Raider but...
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Rage Against The Machine’s ‘Evil Empire’: When Political Rock Actually Converted Teenagers
I wasn’t ready for what happened in the summer of 1996. None of us were. There I was, driving my beat-up Honda Civic with the...
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Deep Purple’s ‘Perfect Strangers’: The Reunion Nobody Expected to Actually Work
I was 13 years old when I stole—okay, “indefinitely borrowed”—my older brother’s copy of Deep Purple’s “Machine Head.” This was 1984, and I was deep...
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I Asked My Dad About Iron Maiden and Discovered He Was Cooler Than I Thought
Parents have this weird way of existing in this one-dimensional space in your mind when you’re growing up. My dad was just… Dad. The guy...
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Children of Bodom’s ‘Follow the Reaper’: When Melodic Death Metal Got Keyboard Solos and Neo-Classical Shred
I first heard Children of Bodom’s “Follow the Reaper” in the most appropriate setting possible: at 3 AM in a record store in Helsinki, bone-tired...