When it was released in the middle of a typically grey, frozen, sleety Canadian winter, it was hard to get a handle on just how good this record really is. But, now that the buds are beginning to bloom, the spring rains are turning things a bit more lush, and those heavy layers of down are finally being put away for a few months, Toronto-based psych-soul outfit the Slakadeliqs’ The Other Side of Tomorrow feels like the perfect soundtrack for whatever you’re up to.

I first encountered this band through its central figure, the extraordinarily talented Slakah the Beatchild (which is probably not his actual birth name, however well it suits him). Since about 2009 I have been following his career, checking out his (numerous) projects and side-projects (including his terrific hip-hop thing Art of Fresh), and finding myself almost perpetually amazed at his gift for melody, structure, mood, and flow. Whatever the name behind the music he’s putting forward (and this can be a bit confusing, to be sure, between his alter egos and bands), and whether he’s working straight hip-hop, neo-soul, old school soul, or smooth disco-inflected grooves, Slakah seems completely at home.

Now is the time when retrospective “Best of” lists are popping up trying to summarize the standout albums of the 1990s, which helped in defining the decade. Unfortunately, there are so many deserving LPs that are often underrated by critics and overlooked by many in compiling these lists. For every album by Beck inducted into the “Best of the 90s” canon, deserving records by the Lemonheads and Belly are tossed aside. Moreover, for every obvious choice by a well-established artist, more subtlety brilliant follow-ups are considered superfluous and therefore overlooked. Listed below, ordered by release date, is a collection of albums that are too often underrated and overlooked as the best albums of the ‘90s.

Folkies and I don’t usually get along. If it’s a guy, I usually want to shake them, pull on their scraggly beard, and tell them to lighten up. If the artist is female, and cute, I’ll generally pay a bit closer attention, focusing more on how great it would be to date a musician and have her mention me in the liner notes ala High Fidelity than the music. I’m just being honest . . . the music generally doesn’t do it for me. It takes some hard-bitten honesty of the Ryan Adams, Paul Westerberg, or Jay Farrar songbook to make me buy into it. I saw Haroula Rose a few months ago at a singer/songwriter showcase in L.A., and all my old prejudices and cynicisms were firmly in place. A tiny thing, she demurely approached the microphone and smiled, and as she strummed her way through selections from debut album These Open Roads, I found myself getting lost in her homespun tales of heartache, wanderlust, and rebirth, delivered with delicate, honeyed innocence. I was, and remain, enchanted.

Rose strikes the right balance between sweet and bitter, and by favoring sweet, her sometimes biting lyrics go down a lot easier and never feel melodramatic. Her voice is perfectly suited for Top 40, but her sensibilities and sense of humor (see Question #2) seem better suited to small venues than cavernous halls. With recently lauded performances at SXSW, TV placements (How I Met Your Mother, The Lying Game) and new EP So Easy on the way with full length to follow, Rose seems to be doing everything right, winning over cynics like me one show at a time.

In the first entry of this Between the Grooves series, I pointed out a certain Darwinian aspect to the lyrics of Stupid Dream. In the context of that first piece, I was referring to the lyric in “Even Less” where Steven Wilson sings, “Some kids are best left to fend for themselves / And others were born to stack shelves”. This harkening to youth is something done frequently on Stupid Dream; recall how “Piano Lessons” reminisced about the destruction of childhood dreams, pointing out the biopower-like mechanisms by which children are stripped of musical creativity. If they grow up to be musicians, they’re likely to just end up as carbon copies of all the other generic music that plagues the airwaves. Anything else, as the album’s title suggests, is a stupid dream.

With “This Is No Rehearsal”, one of Stupid Dream‘s most radio-friendly moments, Porcupine Tree again explore the dark side of youth in the contemporary age (or, at least how it was understood in 1999). Despite sounding almost cheery in relation to the tracks that come before it (especially the gloom of “Don’t Hate Me”), “This Is No Rehearsal” is the most lyrically dark of the material on Stupid Dream. Though the song’s three stanzas aren’t too specific, Wilson has stated that this song is about the tragic murder of James Bulger, a two-year-old boy, by two ten-year-olds. Putting the fairly upbeat music against the extreme darkness of the subject matter may seem like a depraved bit of black humor, but in reality the song isn’t meant to comment specifically on the Bulger case, nor is it a specific indictment of Bulger’s mother. (Bulger was taken while at a shopping center with his mother). Instead, it can be seen as a criticism of the cruel nature of the modern world, wherein small trips to the shopping mall can end in a tragic and brutal murder.

Mendelsohn: There is something great about the Band’s Music from Big Pink, sort of an undeniable energy and wide-eyed enthusiasm that really makes some of these songs pop off the wax. But then there are a couple of numbers that just don’t have it all together and that makes the overall cohesiveness of this record suffer. I’m going to blame Bob Dylan. You OK with that, Klinger? That’s about the only thing I have against this album, other than the fact that I like their self-titled sophomore effort more. That record has it all going on—expect for having an awesomely great sing-along song like “The Weight”. I suppose you could make a case for “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”, but “The Weight” is much more fun to listen to people butcher. What song would you rather listen to people butcher with off-key caterwauling?

Klinger: I oppose caterwauling in all its forms, Mendelsohn—you know that. I’m more concerned with your off-handed comment that Bob Dylan is somehow to blame for you not enjoying Music from Big Pink as much as The Band. Yes, Bob wrote or co-wrote three of the songs here (guitarist Robbie Robertson had not yet positioned himself as chief songwriter), but I’d still say that this is very much the Band’s album. You’re starting to sound like a kid who decides he doesn’t like pickles, but then the burger shows up with pickles on it by accident and you tell him he can just scrape the pickles off. But he decides he can still taste the pickles on the burger and he makes a boo-boo face the entire time and only takes two bites. Well guess what? That just means more burger for me, Mendelsohn.