List one great album per year for the nineties

1991 - Solitude Aeturnus - Into The Depths Of Sorrow

1992 - Testament - The Ritual

1993 - Paradise Lost - Icon

1994 - Marillion - Brave

1995 - Tad Morose - Sender of Thoughts

1996 - Evereve - Seasons

1997 - Fates Warning - A Pleasant Shade of Gray

1998 - Katatonia - Discouraged Ones

1999 - Paradise Lost - Host

just one album per year was hard, there are many others I thought of, maybe another list in the near future :)

1990 - Annihilator - Never, Neverland

1992 - Neneh Cherry - Homebrew

1993 - Jamiroquai - Emergency on Planet Earth

1994 - Brooklyn Funk Essentials - Cool and Steady and Easy

1995 - Saga - Generation 13

1996 - Groove Collective - We the People

1997 - Fish - Sunsets on Empire

1998 - 4Hero - Two Pages

1999 - Gov't Mule - Life Before Insanity

Apparently the nineties didn't have much to offer to me, except some great hiphop, tiphop, drum&bass, crossover/rapmetal and the occasional thrashmetal. This was also the decade of boy- and girlbands and stupid summer-hits. Some people say the nineties were better than the eighties. Well, every decade has his lowpoints. The nineties were also dominated by MTV unplugged. Every single artist that ever live recorded an acoustic album.

I didn't really care for eurohouse, alt.rock, grunge and (highschool-)punkrock.
Luckily there was a renaissance of southern rock and some metalbands in the late nineties.

1997 and 1995 and 1991 turned out to be really good years, I have dozens of albums to chose from.
I had a really hard time picking out an album for 1992 and 1996.

In these years I didn't listen to the music that was released that day, I listened to old music ( I was still discovering music, as I was 14-24, in that decade). I only started to listen to the music of the nineties a few years later. Except for Jamiroquai, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Faith No More, because I knew people who played that music. I started with discovering metal and than jazzfunk/triphop/drum&bass.
The whole grung/alt.rock I never really gave any attention to.

Thanks to this list I'm all into jazzfunk/triphop, wich is the best this decade had to offer (in my opinion), mixing funk, jazz, r&b, hiphop, fusion, ethnic music and so on.

This was still a decade heavily directed by the recordlabels. So there's a lot of bands that never got a chance in those days. As the internet provides us with small-label-bands and demo's from that decade, there's a lot to re-discover.

Luckily more and more artists founded their own labels (diy) and a lot of non-popular music still hit the markets. Especially dancemusic and hiphopmusic found ways to release their albums.

This was also a very expensive decade. CD's cost somewhere between 20-40 guilders (10-20 euros) a piece.
We were really ripped off by the big labels and recordshops.
Luckily those days are far behind.

Anyway even nineties wasn´t as a whole even near the greatness of 60-70 music, in nineties some of my favourite artists (Sonic Youth, P J Harvey, Tom Waits, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Nomeansno, the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, 22 Pistepirkko, Radiopuhelimet) made really great albums. Also have to mention Haikara made really great comeback album.

In the end of eighties and begin of nineties there was a great alternative wave in Finland, lots of great albums were made, but it ended in the middle-end of nineties.

At the end of the nineties something even more terrible happened: numetal. Numetal took (genuine) crossover/hiphop/metal/hardrock and made it into something rediculous (Limp Bizkit etc.)

The great days of deathmetal and thrash-metal were over when Nirvana was pushed to the fore.

The only hardrockband that survived the nineties was Bon Jovi, I guess.
As for progressive rock; only Marillion was big league (EMI), but at the end of the nineties, that was all but gone.

Thank god for the internet. A lot of great music finds its way to us, without having to rely on labels and music televison.

I myself (by the way) am a great fan of drummachines. I love the history of drummachines and sequencers as much as I like flutes, acoustic guitars and mellotrons.
The 80's and 90's were great eras for the development of drummachines.

And the eighties and nineties brought in a new way of making music: sampling.

A lot of great 70's records found their way in the music of dance, hiphop, triphop, drum&bass etc.

And for those who say drummachines and sampling is not making music: it's much easier to play a guitar or blow a flute than to program a sequencer/drummachine and sampling is really hard and is an art of it's own (like timestretching etc.) But that's a whole other discussion.

I love how hiphop and jazz moved forward and didn't stray behind. I love it when bands/acts continu to explore and mix styles.

1991: Coil - Love's Secret Domain

1992: Naked City - Leng Tch'e

1993: Beherit - Drawing Down the Moon

1994: CMX - Aura

1995: Swans - The Great Annihilator

1996: Tool - Ænima

1997: Emperor - Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk

1998: Mark Hollis - Mark Hollis

1999: Rowland S. Howard - Teenage Snuff Film

Great list also. I thought about nr.1 and nr.2 aswell. Even got a RHCP-tattoo because of that album.

Except, I really don't like Radiohead, but that's just my taste.

1990 - Naked City - Naked City

1991 - Talk Talk - Laughing Stock (honorable mention to MBV's Loveless)

1992 - Rage Against the Machine - Rage Against the Machine

1993 - Aphex Twin - Selected Ambient Works 85-92

1994 - Tortoise - Tortoise

1995 - Labradford - A Stable Reference (honorable mention to Rachel's Music for Egon Schiele and Cardiacs' Sing to God)

1996 - Swans - Soundtrack for the Blind (honorable mention to Dirty Three's Horse Stories) 

1997 - Godspeed You! Black Emperor - F#A#∞

1998 - Boredoms - Super Ae (honorable mention to Duster's Stratosphere)

1999 - Sigur Ros - Agaetus Byrjun

1991 Pixies - Tompe le Monde

1992 nirvana - incesticide

1993 Earth - Earth 2

1994 Kyuss - Welcome to Sky Valley

1995 Cathedral - The Carnival Bizarre

1996 Turbonegro - Ass Cobra

1997 Electric Wizard - Come My Fanatics

1998 Neutral Milk Hotel - In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

1999 The Magnetic Fields - 69 love songs

1991: Mr. Bungle - ST

1992: Devil Doll - Sacrilegium

1993: Voivod - The Outer Limits

1994: Jeff Buckley - Grace

1995: Pink Floyd - PULSE

1996: Devil Doll - Dies Irae

1997: Devin Townsend - Ocean Machine

1998: Opeth - My Arms, Your Hearse

1999: Opeth - Still Life

1990: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - The Good Son

1991: Entombed - Clandestine

1992: Bel Canto - Shimmering, Warm and Bright

1993: Belly - Star

1994: Lush - Split

1995: The Cardigans - Life

1996: Immolation - Here in After

1997: Sigh - Hail Horror Hail

1998: Marge Litch - Fantasien 1998

1999: Stereolab - Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night