CMJ New Music Monthly, Volume 25: September 1995 (compilation album) by Various Artists

From paladisiac 01/04/2012 19:39

These college music journal discs often packed about 20 songs onto each CD, a great way to sample mostly-alternative music in the pre-napster days, and this one provides a great sampling of alternative music in an era vacated by Kurt Cobain, scrambling for the next big thing (as it would until the nu-metal phase shoved its d|ck into radio). But the musical styles and quality between songs are almost-always too disparate to quantify one of these discs as an "album" except in the case of this disc.

CMJ hit its mark in September of 1995 with a fun collection of alternative rock gems (and a couple of brief hip-hop ditties), some of which pulled on a few soundtracks of that day. The best tracks come from letters to cleo, innocence mission, ben folds five (dissing the alternative scene at the time) and hagfish (a song about oral pleasure). You even have a John Coltrane intermission about halfway through! Not too shabby of a mid-90s music time capsule.