Emily's Albums A to Z

Listened: Wednesday February 1

Vitalogy was one of the first CDs I ever bought (during early high school). It’s also one of the first I remember having consciously thought-out, cool packaging, similar to special record packaging back in the day. I bought this album because I liked Corduroy and Better Man so much, and my brother had Vs on cassette tape, and we spent many hours listening to it.

At the time, I was surprised and shocked by the very punkish and experimental elements of this album, since it wasn’t the kind of music I was into yet. Spin the Black Circle, Not for You and Whipping all spun my head around a bit with their hard punky sounds, though I think they were the beginning of my introduction to and interest in such things, too.

Pry To and Hey Foxymophandlemama That’s Me are still pretty annoying experiments. Foxy might not  be so bad were it not nearly 8 minutes long. And Bugs… oh, Bugs. My reaction to that hasn’t changed. What The Eff? These songs often make me feel like Pearl Jam wanted to see how much weirdness they could get people to buy after establishing themselves as a successful band.

Corduroy and Better Man, though, are still really classic-sounding, having aged quite well. Immortality is a good song too, but it sounds so very, very 90s to me. Not necessarily in a bad way, but it hasn’t aged as well.

Needless to say, this was a nice reminder of days past, but I doubt I’ll be ripping this to my iPod any time soon. And the 1995 me would have had no idea what that means.