Radio station CHRW is out of the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario. The station’s web site hosts the very extensive London Music Archive of rare recordings covering five decades of local music from the busy university town of London. There’s so much of it that it is nearly impossible to get a real grip on the good stuff.

Fortunately, I’ve discover three CHRW created compilations that places all this music in perspective. The first one is call The 1991 London Compilation while the next two volumes gets a name change to London Underground. There’s about 3 hours of music from the 1990s ranging from mainstream rock to punk and beyond. As expected, the quality depends on the band and ranges from awful to awesome but the average track is quite good and leads me to believe that London was a great place for some clubbing in the 90s and probably still is. It’s would be best to let you make your own discoveries but just for fun here’s a few of my favorite tracks on the series…

The 1991 London Compilation: The rowdy “Bigh Whey Blues” by Remedy, Free jazz from The Eric Stad Free Music Unit, and tight harmony by Nomad on a world-pop “Afrika”.

London Underground 2: Adam West’s big midwest rock sound on “Things”, Bassbag’s punk excursion titled “The Reaper”, and Suffer Machine’s amazing hybrid of roll and soul on “Revolutionary”. This volume is my pick for the best of the three.

London Underground 3: A Green Day inspired “The Crux” by Blanket, smart pop-rock songwriting on “Ship in a Bottle” by Dumb, Genocide’s pseudo-comic rapping and snarling on “Listen as I Laugh”, and a oh-so-cute Bubblegum rock treat called “Leon” by Scratching Post.

There’s plenty of good bands here. Most of them have albums in the London Archive so you can hear more (and find plenty of other artists in many different genres) if you are willing to search. The albums are available by separate tracks in 128kbps MP3.

Download
The 1991 London Compilation
London Underground 2
London Underground 3