The 100 Greatest Indie-Rock Albums Ever

表演者 : Pavement
出版者 : Matador Records

评语 : Forming after college in Stockton, California, recording in their crazy, 40-something drummer’s home studio, Pavement were low-key geniuses casually turning the random noises in their heads into pop perfection. Eighties indie rock often felt like a safe s

表演者 : Sonic Youth
出版者 : Geffen Records

评语 : If Slanted and Enchanted was indie’s Sgt. Pepper’s, this was its version of the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s Electric Ladyland: a double-LP psych-out that exploded like a car bomb. Befitting Reagan-era Manhattan, its acid punk is bad-trippy. But original MIL

表演者 : The Replacements
出版者 : Restless Records

评语 : Spraying pathos like Bud from a longneck, these Minneapolis fuck-ups hurled themselves through a garbled mess of hardcore, hair-of-the-dog metal and DTs piano ballads and emerged like wobbly conquistadors. Credit Paul Westerberg’s dumbfoundingly great son

表演者 : R.E.M.
出版者 : EMI Int'l

评语 : Coming in like a radio station from a strange, faraway land (Athens, Georgia), R.E.M.’s full-length debut arrived just as postpunk was dead-ending into arty weirdness and dopey new wave. The songs were often downright beautiful, and Michael Stipe’s impass

表演者 : Pixies
出版者 : 4AD

评语 : The frumpy Bostonians had psychotic surf guitars, surrealist sex-starved shrieking and clangorous, eardrum-punishing noise. But their full-length debut also cranked out tune after tune of bizarre bubblegum fun. The loud-quiet-loud dynamics and Black Franc

表演者 : The Arcade Fire
出版者 : Merge

评语 : Throughout this Montreal troupe’s debut, cataclysms (snowstorms, blackouts) set the stage for Win Butler’s fantasies and nightmares of adolescent freedom. There are multipart chorales and metaphors purpler than Barney, but the spirit is pure punk.

表演者 : The Velvet Underground
出版者 : Polydor / Pgd

评语 : Lou Reed, a shades-wearing, heroin-liking poet of urban doom, traded wailing amps for clear, pastoral beauty on the VU’s third album, opening up his cold New York heart to sing about the search for salvation in a fallen world.

表演者 : My Bloody Valentine
出版者 : Plain

评语 : Kevin Shields’s warm, lavishly detailed torrents of guitar noise and Bilinda Butcher’s androgynous purr spawned a generation of followers.

表演者 : Big Star
出版者 : Rykodisc

评语 : Alex Chilton is indie rock’s first folk hero, and this is his most mythic moment. Raggedly gorgeous, his band’s third album is full of weary power-pop, shaky guitar and piano chords that seem less played than slumped on. Proof that “perfection” is overrat

表演者 : The Smiths
出版者 : Warner Bros / Wea

评语 : Guess what, boys: It’s OK to be miserable. That’s the lesson to be drawn from this debut, wherein guitarist Johnny Marr jangles merrily and Morrissey swoons like a heartbroken lady-in-waiting whose corset is too tight. It set the lilac-scented stage for y

表演者 : Minutemen
出版者 : Sst Records

评语 : The 45-song masterpiece from this awesomely unglamorous trio of self-described SoCal “corndogs” spews revelations in the disjointed babble of Everydude confusion and rage. Bighearted, beefy D. Boon rifles through punk, folk, jazz, a Steely Dan cover and t

表演者 : Dinosaur Jr.
出版者 : Sst Records

评语 : These long-haired Massachusetts punks couldn’t talk to girls — they could barely even talk to one another — so they poured all their angst and longing into these sludgy, warbling jams. And it turned out that frontman J Mascis was hiding his love of Neil Y

表演者 : Hüsker Dü
出版者 : Sst Records

评语 : A concept double LP about a runaway kid’s heartbreak? By a hardcore band? This Minneapolis trio’s fiery plunge into arty psychedelia was risky. But both Bob Mould and Grant Hart had enormous range as songwriters, and their idea of “arty psychedelia” was s

表演者 : De La Soul
出版者 : Tommy Boy

评语 : As their contemporaries were declaring themselves “hard as hell” (Run-D.M.C.) or plotting revolutions (Public Enemy), these complicated Long Islanders came out of the gate with cryptic jokes and Day-Glo flowers, while producer Prince Paul took sampling to

表演者 : X
出版者 : Rhino / Wea

评语 : Thrift-store poets in black leather jackets, singer-bassist John Doe and his soon-to-be ex-wife Exene Cervenka set stories of love on the rocks against the City of Angels’s skeezy backdrop. Billy Zoom’s rockabilly switchblade guitar made the heavy subject

表演者 : Slint
出版者 : Touch & Go Records

评语 : Mathematic time signatures? Uncool. A song about a depressed sailor, based on Coleridge’s The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner? Mega uncool — unless you’re Louisville, Kentucky’s Slint, whose knotty, amebic tempos and steely guitar rumble engulfed their songs

表演者 : The White Stripes
出版者 : V2

评语 : Jack and Meg White’s third record transformed them from garage revivalists to saviors of rock. Its secret is that it aims high — Jack’s trying for nothing less than a place in the classic-rock canon — and they pull it off with the absolute economy of mean

表演者 : Joy Division
出版者 : Qwest / Wea

评语 : In keeping with their moniker (slang for a Nazi-concentration-camp brothel), Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis played out an Everyman’s flailing attempt to find human warmth and connection in an emotional wasteland. Yet despite the menacing metallic echoes

表演者 : Sleater-Kinney
出版者 : Kill Rock Stars

评语 : As pissed as the Clash and as joyously poppy as the Go-Go’s, the Portland, Oregon, trio had more faith in the world-remaking power of rocking out than any band of the ’90s. In a time when “slacker irony” was all the rage, screaming demon Corin Tucker’s fi

表演者 : The Hold Steady
出版者 : French Kiss

评语 : If Johnny Rotten was raised on classic rock in Midwestern mall parking lots and looked more like a CPA, he could be Craig Finn, whose band treats the sounds of Bruce Springsteen and Hüsker Dü like they’re the most natural double bill in the world.

表演者 : The Modern Lovers
出版者 : Sanctuary UK

评语 : Recorded in 1972 and released after the band had broken up, these crude demos became a landmark: the bridge between the Velvet Underground (whom frontman Jonathan Richman idolized) and punk rock. Richman had no time for fancy stuff — he was too busy being

表演者 : Meat Puppets
出版者 : Rykodisc

评语 : Brothers Curt and Cris Kirkwood were Arizona acidheads who fingerpicked hillbilly solos and loved hardcore punk, so they accompanied their mumbled country visions of desert alienation with psychedelic sun-stroked noodling. Singing about the devil, drugs,

表演者 : Yo La Tengo
出版者 : Atlantic / Wea

评语 : Husband-and-wife team Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley, foster parents to a million heartwarming squalls, spent the sweetest record of their 20-year career mumbling about the strangeness of love over haunting distortion, meditative folk and droning organs. A

表演者 : The New Pornographers
出版者 : Matador Records

评语 : It was originally an ad-hoc trifle, recorded over the course of almost three years: frontman Carl Newman’s vivacious power-pop project, with additional songs written by Destroyer’s Dan Bejar and occasional vocals by alt-country singer Neko Case. Then it c

表演者 : Sebadoh
出版者 : Domino

评语 : Leaving Dinosaur Jr., where his bass playing and atonal prattling were clearly not being appreciated, Lou Barlow became indie’s preeminent sensitive male — James Taylor with a bong, a crappy tape recorder and free time to translate his girl-scarred soul i