Acclaimed Music Top 30 Albums from 1997 poll

My favorites among stuff that didn't make the cut (the first would be my vote if it were an option):

Guided By Voices - Mag Earwhig!
Orb - Orblivion
Faith No More - Album Of The Year
Wu-Tang Clan - Wu-Tang Forever
Pizzicato Five - Happy End Of The World
Company Flow - Funcrusher Plus
Oasis - Be Here Now (yes, seriously)
Stereolab - Dots & Loops
Apples In Stereo - Tone Soul Evolution
Aphex Twin - Come To Daddy
Fantastic Plastic Machine - S/T
Takako Minekawa - Cloudy Cloud Calculator

Also, I was largely living off of CMJ comps back then. My 'best of' mixtape of that stuff is easily the best unofficial album of that year for me.

Orblivion is a seriously underrated record IMO.

Yes, every time I hear it I realize how much I myself underrate it in comparison to earlier Orb albums.

There are a couple of favourites in here - Brighten The Corners, Blur, Vanishing Point. Lots of 'difficult' follow-up albums here too though - Fat of the Land, Dig Your Own Hole, In It For The Money, Colour & the Shape - all of which were celebrated and held up at the time but I felt weren't anywhere near as good as their preceding records.

OK Computer is the exception though. An outstanding follow-up to the already excellent The Bends, and a really important record for me at the time, which I bought on release the day I finished my GCSEs.

OKC is one of a handful of records that completely fulfilled my unrealistic expectations. Still holds up/doesn't sound dated.

I guess I'll need to listen to it again, but I remember some of the single b-sides being better than most of the stuff on OKC proper.

I like all of the Radiohead that I've heard just fine, but Kid A is the only album of theirs that really knocked my socks off.

I definitely prefer "Polyethylene (Parts 1 & 2)" and a couple other b-sides to "Electioneering."

Jesus, this year

1 12 Radiohead - OK Computer
2 241 Daft Punk - Homework
4 252 Björk - Homogenic
5 265 The Chemical Brothers - Dig Your Own Hole
6 266 Spiritualized - Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space
9 482 Missy Misdemeanor Elliott - Supa Dupa Fly
10 484 The Prodigy - The Fat of the Land
15 594 Erykah Badu - Baduizm
16 610 Roni Size / Reprazent - New Forms
18 684 Portishead - Portishead

One of these... I think I can cut Missy, The Prodigy and Roni Size on first pass but how the hell do I pick from what's left over?

also this is OTM: Orblivion is a seriously underrated record IMO.

Might be my favorite Orb album; "Toxygene" is definitely my favorite of their singles.

Bah, OKC is genuinely my favourite album on this list I think.

― the joke should be over once the kid is eaten. (chap),

Actually fuck it I just voted for Bjork.

xp i love the track on Orblivion with the Scouser going on about Beelzebub

I definitely prefer "Polyethylene (Parts 1 & 2)" and a couple other b-sides to "Electioneering."
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― Montgomery Burns' Jazz (Tarfumes The Escape Goat), Thursday, August 13, 2015 2:56 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

In retrospect it's not a perfect album. Even at the time I hated Electioneering and found Let Down a bit of a drag. But I know what Tarfumes means about fulfilling expectations. As a 16 year old who'd been weaned on Britpop and grunge, it just sounded so ambitious and three-dimensional compared to much other rock I'd heard in the preceding years. Never mind the fact it followed on the back of The Bends, itself a huge leap on from Pablo Honey - the changing-up of styles that constitutes Radiohead's first four albums is remarkable.

I love OK Computer so much and think its rock canon classic status really is deserved BUT Homogenic is one of my half-dozen favourite albums ever so I'm voting for that. In It for the Money and Life After Death are up there too.

Also I'm heartened by Old Lunch's love for Mag Eawhig!, a lot of GBV fans seem to dislike that album but I think it's one of their best.

no Velvet Rope eh?

Nick Cave seems to get into a lot of these.

I listened to Spring Heeled Jack more than New Forms tbh

I occasionally think Mag Earwhig! might be my favorite GBV album. It hits the perfect balance of capturing Pollard's randomness while also sounding like a coherent album rather than just a collection of songs.

*Spring Heel rather

New Forms has some good stuff on it but overall it's an overlong slog. I've tried any number of times think I've only listened to it all the way through once or twice.

Jungle/dnb never did really work as an album genre.

Old Lunch - no love for Fantasma? If you're mentioning albums by P5, FPM, Minekawa, Apples in Stereo...

That was probably my 3rd favorite album this year, only b/c '97 was so stacked. If I were to rank 'em:

1. Ween - The Mollusk
2. P-Model - Electronic Tragedy
3. Cornelius - Fantasma
4. Orb - Orblivion
5. Radiohead - OK Computer
6. The Chemical Bros - Dig Your Own Hole
7. Modest Mouse - Lonesome Crowded West
8. Bjork - Homogenic
9. Denki Groove - A
10. Aqua - Aquarium

I tried listening to OK Computer and it sucked

yeah, that's my experience (new forms). i like a few songs but it's very long and kind of polite-sounding to me. i've been beat-down on ILM before for saying this, but the whole 'drum'n'bass with real instruments' felt to me at the time like a way to put an acceptable face on jungle. Railing is still a jam though.

Dylan

There are a couple of favourites in here - Brighten The Corners, Blur, Vanishing Point. Lots of 'difficult' follow-up albums here too though - Fat of the Land, Dig Your Own Hole, In It For The Money, Colour & the Shape - all of which were celebrated and held up at the time but I felt weren't anywhere near as good as their preceding records.

― 9 days from now a.k.a next weekend. (dog latin), Thursday, August 13, 2015 1:44 PM (35 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

There's nothing "difficult" about any of these albums, and there never was! All of those albums still hold up, IMO.

Yeah I wasn't expecting the Chems to still sound good but it really does. They did such a good job on that one.

'Difficult' not the right word, but these were all New Jerseys, in that they were the big acclaimed records that somehow tipped the act into 'game is up' territory for me. Fat Of the Land, especially, was a massive let down. Dig Your Own Hole had plenty of great tracks but somehow lacked some of the rough edges that made their first album so exciting. Colour & the Shape consolidated the Foos as a stadium rock band, whereas the first album was still a grimey, noisy Nirvana spinoff. And I just prefer the singles from I Should Coco to IIFTM.

That Cornershop album still sounds great. It really captured that eclectic late 90s zeitgeist imo. I hated OK Computer at the time but I've grown to like it now although I've never considered it a masterpiece or even their best album. Homework and Dig Your Own Hole were big albums for me as I was getting into dance music more and more. I was tired of guitar music at this point and I was listening to more dance and older stuff like jazz and 60s stuff like Beach Boys and Scott Walker. I was big into Todd Rundgren's A Wizard A True Star. I loved BTC at the time but its easily the dullest Pavement album to my ears now.

Music For A Jilted Generation was so effortlessly sinister-sounding. The darkside of rave culture after the Prodigy's earlier dabbling in kiddy rave. As a kid, I was actually afraid to play it - the whole thing just sounded so illicit. But FOTL suffered from timing issues (coming out about a year after Firestarter), not enough variety, too many bad choices for guest-spots, too much Keith Flint, too much explicit 'aren't we crazy danger people' stuff.

When you're writing Dig Your Own Hole, are you actually thinking of Surrender?

Thing with a lot of these albums is that many of them I'd get into up to a couple of years after they came out. Without the internet you were limited to buying what you could afford or what you could get on tape off your friend. So BTC is more of a '98 album for me. Either/Or is '99 etc..

xp I didn't bother with Surrender - I hated the singles off of it.

xp FOTL got mixed reviews at the time iirc. I remember being disappointed by it. They were slipping into self-parody.

don't get me wrong, I love things like electrobank and block rocking beats and stuff, but I just think the first album sounds better and seems to have held up better in retrospect whereas Dig is very much of a time.

Whereas, aside from the utterly perfect "Chemical Beats", I feel the exact opposite way.

Even though Music For The Jilted Generation is absolutely classic, Keith Flint was a big reason why The Fat Of The Land ended up taking off and selling so much, particularly the way he looked in the 'Firestarter' video.

'Narayan' is so good that I can even overlook the fact that fuckin' Crispian Mills (of all people) is on it!

I'm with DJP here. But I'd add in The Tim Burgess one off Dust, which I love.

Prodigy album I'm with DL 100% though.

Old Lunch - no love for Fantasma? If you're mentioning albums by P5, FPM, Minekawa, Apples in Stereo...

I've never really listened to much Cornelius. There really isn't any excuse or explanation (particularly given my interests in that direction and the fact that I have listened to Flipper's Guitar). I'll rectify that someday.

Best Radiohead album vs. best Mogwai album vs. best Prodigy album vs. second-best Flaming Lips album. But all of these have songs I never cared for. "A Machine in India." "Katrien." "Fitter Happier" (aged very badly). Ehhh since OKC is gonna get enough votes, I'll go with Young Team. I love the piano-y bits.

'Smack My Bitch Up', 'Breathe', 'Funky Shit', 'Narayan', 'Firestarter', 'Climbatize'... nah, I couldn't say it was a dud record, really.

I missed (and am slightly surprised to see) Vanishing Point on the list. That might be my favorite Primal Scream album but I never got the impression people rated it terribly highly.

I always forget about it, to be quite honest with you.

Re: the appeal of Spiritualized, LAGWAFIS was my first exposure to them, and I remember it being on the NME playlist pre-release week after week after week, and just wondering 'wtf is this they're listening to and occasionally dropping hints about?' Pre-regular internet access I had pretty much no way of looking up anything about them until interviews started rolling in.

Then there was the whole release put back because of the Elvis thing, and the packaging conceit, and all the drug/drama/Verve/love-triangle soap opera bullshit, which was just fascinating to a 17/18 year old.

My brother was working for Vital Distribution at the time, who handled Dedicated, and he had a chance to win the 12x3" CDs promo version with the original Elvis version on it (just missed out) but he gave me a copy the weekend before it was due out and I can still remember listening to all 70 minutes, rapt, in one sitting, and thinking "I've never heard ANYTHING like this before", because I hadn't; I'd never encountered Spacemen 3, let alone free jazz, drone, avant-noise, Dr John. I remember playing football with mates immediately afterwards and not saying anything for the whole game and my mate Steve asking why I was so quiet for once, and I just said "Spiritualized".

Our friendship group was dispersing post A Levels, and I spent a chunk of the summer visiting mates' houses for the last times to drink and play music and get stoned, and playing this record at them, when all they'd heard before was grunge and britpop, and it seemed to genuinely blow some minds. If you're 18 and stoned and know you're never going to see your friends again and all you like is Pearl Jam and someone plays Cop Shoot Cop at you... it felt amazing.

It felt like Radiohead got the popular critical vote, and The Verve got the sales, but this felt like it did all the things those records were trying to do, but much better. It felt futuristic and classic at the same time, innovative and crafted, intensely personal but also madly expansive. I absolutely fell in love with it in a way few other things had hit me before. I still prefer it to OK Computer, and by a long way, I think; I think of them as being quite similar records aesthetically (modernist British rock, I guess), but OKC felt like it was for moany adolescents pissed at 'the system' (when we'd just thrown the Tories out of government!) and LAG felt like it was a more adult endeavour, emotionally.

But this is obviously not going to chime for everyone!

I'm not feeling super passionate about anything on the list just at the moment. Too bad Carl Craig missed the cut.

Dig Me Out here.

I'm trying to remember: was Zaireeka much to write home about as an album? I mean, it was a fun parlor trick the few times I heard it as intended but I don't really remember the music at all.

It's 'OK' just as 'an album', inasmuch as you can ever consider it as an album. But it's SUCH an outrageous experience and so unlike any other record that to consider it as such is folly, I think. Which is why I won't vote for it here; it feels like voting for a film or a play or a party you were at.

http://devonrecordclub.com/2014/09/19/the-flaming-lips-zaireeka-round-71-nicks-choice/

Vanishing Point is my favourite Primal Scream album that I've heard. They managed to hit on that particular vibe so well.

I feel OKC is an extremely mixed bag in a lot of ways. There's some great stuff on there for sure: Uptight, Lucky, Electioneering into Climbing. But there's a lot of stuff I don't really have time for: obv Fitter is the famously doff track, but tbh Karma Police & No Surprises wore out their welcome quick, and Tourist and Let Down are kind of listless slogs. Yes, Let Down has pretty colors, but so does Uptight and that track has an elated, jazzy buoyancy where Let Down has only leadenness. And I like Android okay, and its impressive how it manages to seem compressed and yet expansive enough to imply that that one track will be enough as a follow-up to the entire Bends album, but I feel like the logic of the track (tension->explosion->spent, wearied reverence) is kind of pat, bordering on cliche (though tbrr it does feel like it could actually belong on "the greatest album ever" which is more than I can say for Exit Music or Tourist or Karma Police)

Drugs A. Money's list looks nice too; my droney DAM-esque picks for '97 wd be Hash Jar Tempo "Well Oiled" and the Azusa Plane's "Tycho Magnetic Anomaly"

Thank you :-) re HJT: Under Glass a lot but I have a hard time getting into Well Oiled for some reason. I will def check out that Azusa Plane album though. Also imago's list seems really good, too...

That should read "I like Under Glass a lot..."

xxp good post; largely agree

would go further and say 'no surprises' is trite & shit. sorry that is just my opinion

the 'let down' false ending is kinda great but yeah it's weighted down by that portentous & overbearing tone; it doesn't feel like it's quite earned its own grandeur

first three tracks are cooking with gas but for some reason nobody else twigged how frontloaded the album is (mostly coz 'climbing up the walls' is so good probs lol)

i was never the most fervent radiohead fan, but at this point in time the album just seems to be so of its time and neither old enough to be interesting, or new enough to be fresh so that i literally couldn't sit through it.

HATE the production.

i voted for mogwai young team from pure campanilismo

xp i'd be interested to hear why you hate the OKC (assuming that's what you mean) production. at the time it felt like the most space-age thing, like the opening minutes of planet telex turned into a full album.

i'd argue a lot of accusations of triteness/cliche when it comes to OKC are only really applicable in hindsight, if only because it's become that way through setting a benchmark that others have followed, or through being overplayed.

even 'fitter happier' sounded cool at the time, although it's easy to laugh at it now. the text-to-speech voice, 'a pig in a cage on antibiotics', the fact it's obviously a filler but also an 'eye-of-the-duck' thing that epitomises the album, 'shot of baby smiling in back-seat', the overall dystopian tone of the thing - all these are kind of laughable now in today's context, but they felt pretty new and arresting at the time.

Missy Elliot was more futuristic and arresting though.

apples and oranges

Not in this poll.

My only exposure to Missy at this point was via her singles and she didn't SOUND futuristic until "Beep Me 911", which wasn't released until 1998

this is apples and oranges, c'mon man.

I'm just saying that I owned both albums, liked OKC, but was blown away by "The Rain" in contact (Homogenic too).

*on contact

I could not get past "Beep beep/Who got the keys to my jeep?/VROOOOOOOOM"

I did think the video was hilarious, though

Seeing/hearing the 'The Rain' video for the first time was mesmerising.

I'm just saying that I owned both albums, liked OKC, but was blown away by "The Rain" in contact (Homogenic too).

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, August 19, 2015 2:20 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

There's a commonly-held wisdom (especially in the UK musicsphere) that says 1997 was the year pop started going space-age. So yeah, you had all these albums, OKC, Ladies & Gentlemen, Homogenic, maybe even Urban Hymns (but I never cared to listen to the Verve), going for a grander, artier, more 'futuristic' vision maybe as a counter-attack to Oasis' 'real rock for real people'.
There's an inkling of truth in this, especially if you viewed music through a UK rock/pop lens (like I did at the time, admittedly), and you could easily lump in things from other plains - in the US, Mellon Collie from a few years before, the Sophtware Slump a few years later; and of course stuff in other genres like rap and r'n'b, although I find it hard to make connections between the timelines and scenes as they seemed quite separated.
Late 90s feels like a transitional period for me, music-wise, and '97 was the start of that transition from listening primarily to Britpop and grunge and starting to embrace other styles - hip hop, electronic music, 60s and 70s music etc. Looking back I think Radiohead represented a big part of this - moving away from the acoustic and hard rock of The Bends and into a more 3-dimensional sound. The difference might feel extremely subtle now, but as a UK teen it was a big deal to me; OKC seemed to be looking forward in a way that Blur and Oasis hadn't managed to in any way up until then, sharing more in common with Portishead than those bands or even old Radiohead.

I can agree with you on the crucialness of OKC while still thinking that it still is p moldy. Kid A does,a much better job of portentously/symbolically granting pop a vision of its future while at the same tkme being a compelling listen

Also imago I heartily recommend Laddio Bolocko and that Gravitar album to you