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.

Matchbox Twenty

[#] Yourself or Someone Like You (1995)

They don't make 'em like this anymore—up to you what that means.

Reviewed January 6, 2024

In the 70s, we got a handful of albums where every single song became a massive radio hit. In the 90s, we wound up with the next closest thing—Matchbox Twenty's Yourself or Someone Like You. Between "3 A.M.", "Push", "Real World", "Back 2 Good", "Girl Like That", and "Long Day", the entire first half of the record plays like a greatest hits. You can still walk into stores and hear these songs over the speaker set today. Divorce yourself from your feelings of a post-"Smooth" Rob Thomas, because when this album first dropped, no one was buying it and not one of these guys were cool. That's quite the glow-up, ain't it? Six gigantic singles, each of which hold up just as catchy and emotionally affecting as they did when the fat guy on the cover first showed his face back in 1995.

Admittedly, Yourself is buoyed entirely by Thomas and his batch of (at the time) newly-written melancholic tunes. Matchbox Twenty's rhythm section is solid but unremarkable, with one whole bass riff that acts as a hook (the crunchy verses on "Busted"). Rob Thomas carries this one as a solo record, his lunging, nasal delivery and tales of cheating and being abused being what sticks in your memory, and quite the sticky protagonist he is! Compared to the front half, the back half of Yourself are largely growers, far from bad tracks in their own right, but definitely not the bold statements that came prior to them. For those highly fond of the singles (like myself), those deep cuts will prove just as emotionally arresting. For everyone else, buyer beware.