Pearl Jam - Vs. (1993)

Everyone falls in love with the music they grew up to.  But revisiting this album for me was a big kick in the pants.  I felt like I was thirteen again, the kid that bought the now-hilarious "window pain" T-shirt
 with the tracks from the album painted on a guy's torso on the opposite side.

This album came out the same year as two other really great albums, Smashing Pumpkins' Siamese Dream and Seam's The Problem With Me. The difference for me between those and Vs is that I only discovered Seam relatively recently (after seeing their penultimate show in 2004 in Milwaukee), and Siamese Dream never really went away for me because I would listen to it every once in a while, updating the context in which I heard it every time. But hearing Vs again after a 12-year absence puts me right back in 7th grade.  And I'm surprised by how much emotion is in Eddie's voice, when my distant memory told me he was kind of hamming it up or whatever.