It's been a couple weeks since my last album review. Two weeks ago I did not review the lone un-reviewed album, the #8 album The Crow: City of Angels Soundtrack, because I could not find it on streaming services. This is not the first time I've struggled finding soundtrack or compilation albums. I suspect it's a licensing issue. One week ago was the same story.

This week there are two new albums that debuted at #1 and #2; I'll do the #2 album next week. Today it's No Code by Pearl Jam I'll be reviewing.

No Code is an album I've barely listened to. The majority of my historical plays were this week. It is one of the more poorly-reviewed Pearl Jam albums, and I have to agree. I don't think I've missed much by not listening to it. I can't recommend that you spend any time on it. I certainly won't purposely listen to it again.

Unplugged by Alice in Chains was recorded live as part of MTV's Unplugged Series. This is one of the more successful Unplugged albums, perhaps in large part due to the fact that the lead singer, Layne Staley, was on a steep decline toward dying from an addiction to drugs and hadn't performed with the band regularly for years.

When I reviewed the eponymous Alice in Chains last year, my summary was that it wasn't as good as their earlier albums. Happily, the songs chosen for the Unplugged set taken from the Alice in Chains album are the strongest ones off an otherwise weak album.

Unplugged is an excellent album and well worth your time. I don't review live albums frequently (it's not really up to me, of course), and one neat thing is that the performance of this album can be watched anytime thanks to the power of the internet:

Hitting #2 on its first week in the charts, Down on the Upside by Soundgarden is the second Soundgarden album I've reviewed. Following up the massive hit Superunknown was always going to be difficult, and Down on the Upside probably did just about as well as could be hoped. It had a few big hits, including Blow Up the Outside World and Burden in My Hand.

As the final album before a 15 year hiatus, it is a good continuation of Soundgarden's sound. If you're in the mood for some grunge, but you don't want to hear Smells Like Teen Spirit or Black Hole Sun again, this is a decent option.

I am super late on this review by almost two weeks, so I'll make this short. Tiny Music... Songs from the Vatican Gift Shop by Stone Temple Pilots hit #4 in its first week on the charts. Tiny Music is worth your time. Check it out!

I've always felt that this week's #6 artist, The Presidents of the United States of America, were kind of a jokey band. Their big hits, Lump and Peaches, off of their eponymous album, are odd with not quite sensical lyrics. The songs are fun earworms, certainly, but I would not call them sophisticated. The band are not one-hit wonders¹. However, they are one-trick ponies, and one-trick ponies do not have staying power.

My recommendation is that PotUSA is fine, but nothing essential. Listen to them when you want a taste of the 90s, but only a taste, because they're not a full meal.

1. They are two-hit wonders and should have been featured in this radio show. ↩︎

If you're not from England, I'll bet you didn't know that 16 stone is equal to 224 lbs.

Early 1996 must have been an exceptionally slow time for new music because this week's album, Sixteen Stone by the English rock band Bush, took roughly a year to reach #10 on the sales chart. This album featured several singles I remember hearing contemporaneously including Comedown, Glycerine, and Everything Zen.

I have listened to Bush a decent amount, but interestingly I have listened to a different (and less popular) Bush album The Science of Things more than Sixteen Stone. My guess is that most of these The Science of Things listens are from before I subscribed to a music streaming service and I listened to that album because it's what was in my collection. Having listened to both albums a fair amount, I agree with the consensus that Sixteen Stone is the better album. I do recommend giving it a spin.

It is unfortunate that I had a thirteen year gap in my listening project. If I had not stopped, or restarted earlier, I might have reviewed Alice in Chains two best recordings: the 1992 album Dirt and the 1994 EP Jar of Flies. They are two of my favorite albums/EPs; I have listened to tracks off them nearly 700 times.

In stark contrast, I have barely listened to the eponymous Alice in Chains album. Listening to this album again I am not upset at my lack of plays. It is nowhere near as good as Dirt and Jar of Flies. On Tidal, of the top thirty tracks by plays for Alice in Chains, only three songs are off the album Alice in Chains. I do not have a Spotify account so I can only see the top ten, but there are zero songs off Alice in Chains on that list.

I can't endorse listening to the album Alice in Chains, but I can strongly suggest giving Dirt and Jar of Flies a play. Dirt, in particular, is one of the greatest grunge albums of all time. The first chord and lyric of first track, Them Bones, hits you hard and grabs your attention like few other songs do.

I think there is only one song off of this week's #9 album by Silverchair that I've heard before. Tomorrow off of Frogstomp got a decent amount of airplay when it came out. The rest of the album seemed new to me, and my last.fm history pretty much confirms it.

Silverchair definitely rode the tails of the Grunge wave, and they did a good enough job of it to sell a couple million copies of Frogstomp. I don't think that I will increase my Silverchair consumption a great deal, but perhaps I'll think it more often when I'm in the mood for some Grunge. You might consider the same!

After two weeks of Christmas music, the decidedly non-holiday Vitalogy by Pearl Jam hit #1 after three weeks on the chart.

I listen to Pearl Jam relatively frequently, but not that often to Vitalogy. It has a few good songs, like Better Man and Corduroy, but overall it's nowhere near as good as Ten. Of course, that's not exactly fair because Ten is one of the best rock albums ever, and one of a few that defined grunge rock.

Overall, I'd recommend checking it out, but if you don't like it as much as Ten, that's fine.

Recorded 31 years ago (to the day), MTV Unplugged in New York by Nirvana hit #1 on its first week on the charts. This was the first Nirvana album released after Kurt Cobain's death in April, 1994.

According to last.fm I have listened to this album over 160 times, so I know it quite well. In one sense, since I know this album so well, and have heard it for 30 years, listening to it now gives me no surprises. In another sense, this is the kind of album I truly look forward to during this project, the albums that bring me back to being a teenager. Obviously when I listen to albums from 30 years ago that are mostly new, it's more interesting, but a good fraction of the more interesting albums I don't like, and they're more work for me.

Nirvana is one of the most important bands of the last 35 years. If you haven't already heard Unplugged, I'm surprised, and you should go about fixing that right away. Listen on headphones or in a quiet room so you can pick up Cobain's mutterings between songs. Too many albums I review belong in the dustheap of history, Unplugged is the exact opposite, and will remain relevant for decades to come.

Squeaking in at #10 is Candlebox by Candlebox. They were formed in Seattle around the same time as much bigger groups, such as Nirvana, Alice in Chains, and Pearl Jam. This album did quite well, but they never reached the same heights on subsequent albums.

I was never that much into Candlebox. I suppose I heard a few of the songs off this album on the radio, but it never made a big impression on me. 30 years later listening to them again my opinion hasn't changed. It's still not that exciting to me. I'll probably never listen to this album again.

For the second week in a row an album debuts at #1 for its first week on the charts. Purple by Stone Temple Pilots is an album that has continued to get radio airplay in the 30 years since it was released. Their first album, Core, is one of the great Grunge Rock albums. Purple is more radio-friendly, but also more psychedelic when compared to Core.

According to last.fm I've listened to tracks off this album over 250 times since 2006. It is likely that I will continue to listen to it, and so should you.

For the first time since I restarted 30 Years On there is a #1 (*) album I have actually listened to multiple times, willingly. Superunknown by Soundgarden is one of the smash hit albums that makes up the Grunge wave that came out of Seattle in the early to mid-1990s. Since I started tracking my music plays, I have listened to some Soundgarden every year for the last 17 years (although 2015 was thin for some reason). As of this writing I have over 500 plays of Soundgarden.

I like to discover new music, and I'm still finding new artists to listen to. Last week a new album by Waxahatchee called Tigers Blood was released and it's great. But there's always going to be a place for the music I listened to as a teenager. A fair number of songs from this album still get steady radio airplay: Black Hole Sun, Fell on Black Days, and Spoonman. The whole album remains worth listening to by me, and by you, forever.

If you go to the Grunge link at Wikipedia, the second paragraph mentions a list of popular Grunge bands and their breakout hit albums: Nevermind by Nirvana, Ten by Pearl Jam, Dirt by Alice in Chains, Core by Stone Temple Pilots, and Superunknown. The (original) lead singers of these bands, except for Pearl Jam, all died untimely early deaths due to drugs or suicide. I guess that says something about Grunge musicians. Oh well, I can enjoy the music without succumbing to the same fate.

(*) The #2 album this week is The Downward Spiral. This was a good week for music 30 years ago!