10 Perfect Soft Rock Albums Of The '90s

10. Yourself Or Someone Like You - Matchbox 20

As we approached the end of the millennium, we were still dealing with the backwash left over from the glory days of grunge. Even though the genre may have started strong with bands like Pearl Jam and Nirvana tapping into something a little more primal, you had the seeds of bands like Creed and Nickelback looking to make some of the blandest butt rock imaginable into the next decade. That's not to say that everyone who took cues from Eddie Vedder was wretched or anything.

Going through Matchbox 20's debut record, there are more than a few songs that can hold up as decent post grunge music, taking the same kind of angst you would hear from grunge and sprinkling in the pop smarts of what was happening in the adult alternative scene at the time. As much as Rob Thomas may have sounded like a carbon copy of Eddie Vedder, you wouldn't hear the original yarler on something as pop friendly as 3 AM or Push, along with riffs that seemed like they were pulled from the Counting Crows playbook.

Though Matchbox 20 were going to get a little too overexposed as the decade wore on, this is where you see them at their hungriest, looking to make the best record they can and maybe even have some fun in the process. That trademark yarl vocal style was not going to be leaving any time soon, but for the soft rock crowd, these were the kind of angsty rock sung by guys that you could bring home to meet your parents.