Top 20 Matador Albums

When Matador unveiled the debut album from Fall-riffing, ad-hoc poetic, slap-dash slackers Pavement, the label was still a fledgling affair. Yet, when Slanted and Enchanted suddenly summoned up the power of popularity —through the snail's-pace process of pre-internet word-of-mouth— the label came into both cash and cachet. Having one of your first-ever releases define the decade to come carries considerable wait; and, via Stephen Malkmus's all-consuming irony, Matador acquired a reputation of 'cool' it is yet to shed. Pavement's eternally-influential art-rock classic is still killer two decades and a reunion cash-in on; the LP a cracking set of submerged-pop whose melodies snap whip-smart whilst the guitar-signal dips and crackles.

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No one can suggest that Liz Phair's instantly-acclaimed debut album means as much now as it did then, back when. Born in an era in which "Women In Rock" were a gawp-worthy novelty, Phair talked a revolutionary game, daring to playfully mock rock mythology. Calling Exile In Guyville a "song by song" response to the Rolling Stones' swaggering, staggering "classic" Exile On Main Street, Phair dared rewrite rock'n'roll's heinous clichés from the lady's perspective. Her blushingly frank take on modern sexual entanglements —sung with plenty of frank sailor-talk and confessionals overshare— gave a face, a voice, and a name to the women who, 20 years earlier, could've only found one place in rock culture: groupie.

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Ohio elementary-school teacher turned drunken rock'n'roll evangelist Bob Pollard could stake a claim for being one of the most prolific artists in music history. With the immortal Bee Thousand, the home-recording enthusiast suddenly found himself the undisputed king of the burgeoning lo-fi movement. His first album for Matador, Alien Lanes, effectively marked Pollard's first ever album "proper." Introducing Guided by Voice's tradmark sound to the masses, it served as a sparkling (if still fuzzy sounding) showcase for a man, and a band, at the peak of their powers. Here, Pollard and co cast off piles upon piles of melodically memorable, British Invasion-evoking pop-songs with a studied, sudsy, buddying casualness.

By the time Matador released Belle and Sebastian's second LP in the USA, the Scottish indie-poppers had a crazed cult following. Fronted by the alternately sentimental and sardonic songsmith-supreme Stuart Murdoch, the band sounded like an alarmingly-twee marriage of Donovan, Felt, and The Smiths; making the bookish British bedsit aesthetic seem endlessly charming and wondrously romantic. Record-shopping weenies of the world suddenly harbored dreams of uniting and taking over, stirred by such rallying cries as the ever-glorious “Judy and the Dream of Horses.” In hindsight, it's not hard to see why the world went loco over If You're Feeling Sinister: its ten note-perfect pop-songs amount to an album bordering dangerously close to perfection.

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Variety may be the spice of life, but rarely does it make for good records. Yet, Yo La Tengo wore the genre-jumping jumper well on I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One; an album that felt not like some erratic, schizophrenic mess, but a singular, coherent, definitive work. Perhaps because they're confessed students of pop history, it somehow makes sense hearing Yo La Tengo rewrite Bacharach, cover the Beach Boys, and ape Neil Young whilst switching from fuzz-pop to shoegaze soundscape to, uh, jazz-funk workout. The LP essentially defines Yo La Tengo's career, which spans eras, styles, and genre-dabblings manifold and varied; and, fittingly, this was the album that took them from under-the-radar, noise-guitar cult act to indie institution.

Though strangely unacclaimed in her day —and even in this day— Mary Timony has found pop-cultural fortune shift in her favor. Thanks to the shifting tides of fashion, hindsight now views her magickal, mystical, maligned-on-release The Magic City through rosy shades. Long before bearded boys started waving the freak-folk banner, Timony was coloring in her storybook wonderlands of witchcraft and dragons with kitschy keytone zaps, mordant medieval disharmonies, fretboard-frying acid-folk flourish, and earnest prog-rock dagginess. Forging into a rainbow-age aesthetic totally out-of-place in the grunged-out mid-'90s, Timony was trussed up in indie-princess-cum-Dungeon-Master threads years before Joanna Newsom would even get out of high-school.