Oh wait, wait, wait…the OP now wants influential, as well as great. Here’s a list that might help: 
ETA: really, check this list out, in particular the Honorable Mentions.
You’re right. I apologize. “Influential” is highly subjective and I should have known that. I wasn’t trying to move the goalposts as much as promote my favorite album from that time. I ask forgiveness.
I guess I’m guilty of thinking primarily of the early 1990’s
I forgot about Sublime, one of my favorite bands
FWIW, Rolling Stone’s list of the 100 Best Albums of the 90s has Exile in Guyville at #20 and Blood Sugar Sex Magic at #19.
It’s at least theoretically possible that the Very Best Rock Album of the 1990’s is quite obscure because for whatever reason it never got the attention it deserved.
Many of my own personal favorite albums from that decade never make it onto these kinds of lists. Maybe they deserve to be. Maybe they don’t, and I just like them so much because they hit my own personal sweet spot.
Anything wrong with a concept, or the end of the decade, or love songs? It’s actually 69 songs about love and love songs, but not a concept.
OK sorry. Here’s my #3 of the decade:
You misspelled “Alien Lanes”.
I suppose under my newfound guidances for subjectivity I have no choice but to include everyone’s choices. Sigh,I should have worded my OP better.
For instance, none of drad_dogs choices resonate with me at all. Never even heard of them. I chose the RHCP record because it sprang out of hair metal’s era, was completly different from the grunge that followed AND was commercially accessible.
Loveless and Blue Lines both came out in 1991, certainly more interesting than RHCP’s cocks-in-socks dullery.
The third biggest tune on the Hot 100 that year was C+C Music Factory’s Gonna Make You Sweat, and that had way more influence than anything guitar-based that year.
You’ve got to be kidding me. RHCP’s playing on that album is as funk as it gets for white boys. Frusciante and Flea LEAP off the album tracks. I cannot agree.
Sorry, but it’s just that there were lots of choices in the 90s, so people went in different directions.
And I haven’t even mentioned Pavement’s “Brighten the Corners” yet. 
Yeah, I was seriously taken aback by that.
I’m trying to imagine a world where all bands are influential. Oh yeah, it’s like the R and R HOF!
Impact is silly record reviewer nonsense. It’s the attempt to marginalize the disliked and support personal preference through the citing of the unmeasurable.
Exile in Guyville was formative. And hell, the RHCP were never that great a BAND…largely due to Kiedis’ weakness as a lyricist and singer. Flat and unlistenable, in my opinion.
I’d be more willing to offer Everclear’s ‘Sparkle and Fade’ and the preeminent CD of the 90s. But it’s an intensely personal and opinion-oriented question. It could easily be Nevermind, or The Gin Blossom’s New Miserable Experience or the Bosstone’s Let’s Face It or several other albums that dominated for a time.
By sheer volume of record sales, she was.
True, I’ve come to realize how fraught with subjectivity this question becomes.
Wait I’m gonna go get my suitcase.
Robert Pollard is a true american treasure. If he’s obscure then, well that explains a lot about the world. (I’m talking guided by voices here) This guy writes like lennon, davies, and zappa, and he has put out 1000 songs. He would not have a singles career in any universe we know, but his songs would be the best, in the universe, and a lot of times they are.
It’s harder to find the great stuff, as time goes on. So that’s a problem, in our musical culture, since rock became a large technocratic industry.
The great people who were inspired by the rock revolution to go forward after the “end of music” or punk or whatever, and keep trying to write good melodies, may be obscure, for you, alt least until someone has heard them.
It was as an overachiever though. It was a huge underground sensation. Record of the year in the Voice. Think pieces up the wazoo. The critical darling who lived up to it and made the critics look good.
Who didn’t tap their feet and sing along with the anthemic choruses of Very Emergency by the Promise Ring?
If the 90s were all about obscure albums by very white guys (and Liz Phair, who was neither obscure nor a guy) then how can anyone forget Thomas Dolby’s 90s comeback triumph, Astronauts & Heretics?
I came in to post, after about ten seconds though, Liz Phair’s ‘Exile’
From beginning to end, not a clunker to be found. And it flows, almost Abbey Roady.
And this is exactly what the OP was asking about.
mmm