Albums are graded on a five-point scale of "Awful-Eh-Good-Great-Classic". I'm highly biased, so don't take it too seriously. Most of these come from my own collection, so the grades skew rather high. Your results may vary if you send me stuff to review.

Each album is given three Essential tracks, my personal favorites, regardless of how weird and inconsequential they are. The Quintessential pick is the one I think best represents the album as a whole, so you can try one song instead of a whole album of songs. Non-Essential picks range from merely disappointing to outright unlistenable.

Sebadoh

[#] Bakesale (1994)

Love, anxiety, and drugs in a blender.

Reviewed July 23, 2019

Lou Barlow was never a very happy man. Early Sebadoh records have been defined in the indie rock canon by his very public hatred of former bandmate J Mascis (amusing, seeing as J ran the boards for the Breeders' cover of Sebadoh's grandest fuck you, "The Freed Pig"), while just about everything else the band has done sounds like one lo-fi "it's not you, it's me" speech after another. Surprise, then, that 1994's Bakesale almost sounds okay with you getting close to it; I've heard plenty of messy breakup albums, but messy currently-in-a-relationship albums less so. A welcome change.

Having finally boiled down the twists and turns of Bubble and Scrape into an catchy and consistent mix of chime-stroke-grind guitars, angular bass parts, Lou's sighs and Jason Loewenstein's cries, only five tracks on Bakesale reach the three minute mark. Some would give the album to Barlow (given the nervy "Magnet's Coil" or the Weezer-y "Together or Alone", they'd be justified), but I find Loewenstein the more interesting of the songwriters here, bringing to mind some of Sunny Day Real Estate's better moments on emo-tinged cuts like "Got It" or "Dramamine". In fact, it's on his "Careful" that he about sums up the entire record: "I just want to do right by you/Sitting safe beside the truth/Beside you".