Top 10 Sub Pop Albums

The best $606.17 recording budget Sub Pop ever presided over, Nirvana's nasty debut bleeds abhorrent attitude. Home to the generation-defining anthem "Negative Creep," Bleach is a monument to the monumental angst of infamous frontman Kurt Cobain. Where historical hindsight has it that the record was only a minor footnote until the success of Nevermind turned it into retroactive platinum, the reality is that Bleach was the culmination of the early, underground, garage-bound Sub Pop era.

The initial release of Superfuzz Bigmuff in '88 put Sub Pop and grunge-rock on the map. Two years later, re-packaged to cotton onto the new craze of "compact discs," it was made even better with the inclusion of killer single "Touch Me I'm Sick." With Mark Arm screaming ridiculously over the top of the Stooges-esque racket, it's Mudhoney's defining song, capturing the Seattle reprobates in signature style: drunken, deranged, predisposed with vomit.

Sub Pop's first 'outside' signing was radical. New Yorker trio Codeine played spaced-out, slowed-down, opiate alt-rock at a snail's pace. As guitarist John Engle laid out sheets of oft-atonal guitar, bassist Stephen Immerwahr kept Codeine's flatlining pulse, playing plodding basslines and singing in a dispassionate monotone. Things like "Three angels/Holes in your socks" and "D for dishes/F for floors/Can't make the grade anymore." Lyrics so prosaic their simplicity became somehow profound, Immerwahr's eked-out syllables carrying the carefully-carved precision of a haiku. Pushing things from whisper quiet to in-the-red loud, Codeine birthed the slowcore movement, presaged Mogwai by half-a-decade, and made one mighty on-the-nod album.

Speaking of birthing movements, Sunny Day Real Estate's electric debut zapped life into the future Frankensteinian monster known as emo. Though it bears little stylistic similarity to the eyeliner-caked Leto-ites of the current emo era, Diary was, upon its release, the catalyst of a movement. Building from the lessons taught by pioneers like The Hated and Embrace, Jeremy Enigk and crew harnessed their emotive riffing, exuberant shouting, and quiet/loud balladry into something massively anthemic.

After half a decade of cranking out a confusing smattering of lo-fi ditties, Sebadoh came of age with Bakesale. The band's best, most focused, most direct work, the album is a showcase for Lou Barlow's stirring songwriting; cuts like "Skull" and "Magnet's Coil" classic lovesongs merely dressed in scrappy, indie-rock threads.

Out of place and out of luck in the mid-'90s, Rhode Island's Six Finger Satellite toiled in near-obscurity for most of their lifespan. Their post-punk-inspired marriage of twitchy guitars and blobby synths ran counter to popular alternative movements of the time, but budding acts like The Rapture and Les Savy Fav took notice, adopting Six Finger Satellite as influential role-models. John MacLean's recent solo success as disco-punk dance act The Juan MacLean —not to mention the current proliferation of tight-pant'd post-punk posses— shows that Paranormalized was just ahead of the pop-cultural curve.

Husband-and-wife team Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang —former members of Velvet Underground-obsessed outfit Galaxie 500— had already crafted out quite a discography by the time they hooked up with Japanese acid-folk hippies Ghost. Though there were cultural boundaries to cross ("wait, you guys practice?" Yang asked), the blessed union eventually birthed this glorious album. Culminating in Yang's impassioned reading of "Eulogy to Lenny Bruce" (Tim Hardin by way of Nico), With Ghost is nine gentle numbers glowing with the warmth of newly-blown glass.

Taking respite from Modest Mouse after the supposed 'commercial failure' of major-label debut The Moon & Antarctica, Isaac Brock made a solo album wielding the countryish licks he'd been whetting since 1997's The Lonesome Crowded West. Made outside the confines of his rockband, Brock obviously felt a musical freedom, there a genuine sense of musical adventure in the Brian Deck-produced studio experimentalism that shrouds these twangy tunes. As songwriter, Brock's Ugly Casanova obsessions were the same as always: the album finding him continuing his career-long lyrical study of mortality. Two years later, back at the helm of his musical day-job, Brock'd go multi-platinum.

Sam Beam's hushed, lo-fi, folkie set of songs were born of late, late nights. Recorded at home on a four-track after his wife and newborn had gone to bed, Beam's music is half whisper, half tape-hiss. The fuzzy-faced songsmith's gentle, rural ditties deal in lyrics like “mother, remember the night that the dog had her pups in the pantry?”, summoning up sentimental images of a mythical, Falknerian South. Shrouded in the white-noise of roomtome, they sound like ghostly remnants of a distant era.

Jimmy Tamborello was stuck, trying to make a follow up to Life Is Full Of Possibilities, the epic 2001 disc from his death-obsessed project Dntel. So, at the suggestion of Sub Pop bigwigs, the Los Angelino electro boffin started trading tapes with Death Cab for Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard, whom he'd collaborated with on the cut "(This Is) The Dream Of Evan And Chan." Going back-and-forth through the post, the original-odd-couple struck upon a fruitful union; Tamborello's precise beatmaking and Gibbard's self-conscious lyricism making for some of the best sad-electro-songs-you-can-still-dance-to since New Order. Give Up has, since, gone on to become Sub Pop's second-biggest selling title, behind Bleach.