Left Behind in a Dream: How Grunge Crushed My Jangle-Pop Heart

In 1990, I was standing under the humming fluorescents of a dusty T-shirt and poster shop on Hollywood Boulevard, flipping through faded images of Morrissey, when a song hit me like a velvet brick: “Obscurity Knocks” by the Trashcan Sinatras.

A wall of shimmering guitars spilled out of the speakers—jangly, melancholic, and so clearly descended from the holy Johnny Marr school of emotional resonance. It was as if “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” had been reincarnated in a Scottish bedroom, passed through a reverb pedal, and handed to someone just wounded enough to understand.

That same year, I fell headfirst into The Sundays’ Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic, and I’ve never quite crawled out. “You’re Not the Only One I Know” may still be my favorite song of all time—part lullaby, part confessional, sung by someone who sounded like they were trying not to wake the ghosts in the room.

In those moments, I was sure I was witnessing the dawn of a new musical epoch—an era where introspective, literate guitar pop would inherit the emotional crown left by The Smiths. I imagined mixtapes stretching into the next decade, filled with chiming guitars and lyrics that quoted Yeats and quietly ruined you.

But then the mood changed.

Nirvana showed up, kicked in the door, and everyone suddenly wanted to scream into the void instead of whisper into the ache. Nevermind dropped, and within what felt like minutes, everyone moved to Seattle, grew out their hair, and baptized themselves in feedback and flannel. The dreamy pop I loved didn’t just fall out of fashion—it was buried in a landslide of Grunge.

The prophecy had already been written in “Obscurity Knocks”—and it delivered.

But I refused to let go. While the world air-guitared to “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” I doubled down on Lloyd Cole, The Cocteau Twins, Lush, Chapterhouse, and The Go-Betweens. I curated sadness. I polished it. I stayed loyal to the bands that sounded like rain and minor chords and unspoken longing.

Grunge? Too growly. Too aggro. Too much boot-stomping and not enough sighing into the mist.

So what carries the flickering torch of that era for me today? What band whispers instead of roars, dreams instead of demands? One song comes to mind: “Love Yourself” by Lovejoy.

It’s not a perfect mirror of those early ’90s tracks, but it has the same fragile DNA—the ache, the beauty, the subtle drama folded into melody. It’s as if someone reached back into my old shoebox of mixtapes, pulled out a strand of sound, and stitched it into something new.

Call me stubborn. Call me sentimental. But I’ll be here, still thumbing through my old CDs, still worshipping at the altar of bittersweet jangle-pop, long after the amplifiers of Grunge have gone quiet.