‘Singles’, the definitive grunge album, still rocks

I think it was just before the riots in Bombay in December 1992, after the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, that I found the Singles album on cassette at what was then the mecca for the city’s music lovers, Rhythm House—a downtown music store or, rather, trove, which doesn’t exist any more. But if there is any album that helped bring Seattle’s grunge sound properly into the mainstream, it was Singles. The original Singles cassette has 13 tracks, most of them by the then ascendant musicians and bands based in and around Seattle, but also by others, including Minneapolis’ Paul Westerberg, a former member of the alt-rock band The Replacements, and Chicago’s Smashing Pumpkins. For anyone wishing to explore Seattle’s grunge phenomenon in music, the Singles soundtrack is, and will remain, the essential go-to album.