Acclaimed Music Top 30 Albums from 1997 poll

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/

At the start of '97, the Prodigy and the Chemical Brothers were two of my favourite acts - Fat of the Land was my first experience of being really let down by an album whereas Dig Your Own Hole was as great as I'd hoped. The electronica album I loved the most that year though was In Sides - a friend lent me it in January and for a while afterwards everything else I listened to sounded rubbish in comparison.

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

I have no Crispian Mills baggage (lol American) so my cosigning of the awesomeness of "Narayan" is without caveat.

I didn't realize anyone rated "Funky Shit", though.

I think Gus Gus - Polydistortion might be my favorite 'electronica' (always hated and always will hate that word) album from '97. There are clearly still lots of '97 albums I've forgotten were '97 albums.

It's another album from that scene/time that, like In Sides, somehow avoids sounding at all dated.

I was going to mention Lamb as well but their debut was 1996; the Gus Gus/Lamb tour I saw in 1997 was SUPER SUPER fun.

OKC is prob my least favorite Radiohead besides In Rainbows

Alfred otm also; Velvet Rope is great. Though I think it was seen as a disappointing follow up to janet. at the time (also, critics not being v enlightened re: big budget pop albums)

the lonesome crowded west if i'm being honest but i love a bunch of these

xxpost Yeah, Lamb has also nicely avoided sounding dated.

Not that datedness is necessarily a criticism. I still love a lot of 'electronica' that sounds like the soundtrack to a movie about hackers.

I didn't realize anyone rated "Funky Shit", though.

― I Am Curious (Dolezal) (DJP), Thursday, August 13, 2015 3:51 PM (57 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I've always liked it!

Darn it, i missed 1996!

ICHTHBAO easily.

If OKC wins I will be sad, and I am a card carrying Radiohead fan.

OKC will win. Resign yourself to fate.

I'm remembering just how quickly it took for OK Computer to become a "canonical" album. Here in the UK, the NME gave it 10/10, and then it came #1 in a Q Magazine readers "All Time Top 100 Albums" poll only nine months after it was released. At the time, and as much as I liked the album, I was kinda "wait, what? seriously?" ... I couldn't help but think all of these reactions were a little too quick. Having said that, though, here we are 18 years down the line, OK Computer is widely considered to be the best album of 1997, and on rateyourmusic.com it's considered to be the best album of all time. Ever. In terms of Acclaimed Music's own All-Time list, it's #12, but even that is above Abbey Road and Dark Side Of The Moon etc.

You may like the album, or you may not, but it does seem to have a stature to it that none of the other records on this list have.

I think OKC's wild praise somehow went completely under my radar. It really doesn't make sense to me...which kinda makes sense as it's in good company with any number of other wildly-praised canonical albums that don't seem particularly special to me.

^^^

I will never "get" Radiohead

congratulations

thx I gave myself a medal and everything

As I said upthread, I think it's fine, but its canonical status seems on par with Sgt. Pepper's (an album that I would sincerely say was maybe on the low end of the best 30-40 albums released in '67).

I think it's largely to do with the right time and place. Like Sick Mouthy says about the Spiritualized record, kids of our generation just hadn't been exposed to that kind of expansive rock music before. The only other thing I can think of is Mellon Collie, which is still very much a hard rock album with a flabbier concept than OKC or LAGWAFIS.

I can't understand any Radiohead fan saying they like OKC and In Rainbows the least btw.

I can understand In Rainbows because it's a collection of songs that work against each other rather than build upon each other; I always have a much more positive experience listening to the material when it comes up in a random shuffle or a computer-generated playlist than I do when I try to listen to the album.

That's true. I guess another reason OKC is considered such a classic is because it's sequenced so well. It has a beginning, middle and end and an overriding loose theme.

I think it's largely to do with the right time and place. Like Sick Mouthy says about the Spiritualized record, kids of our generation just hadn't been exposed to that kind of expansive rock music before.

― 9 days from now a.k.a next weekend. (dog latin), Thursday, August 13, 2015 6:12 PM (32 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

What, their parents didn't have one of those multi million-selling Pink Floyd albums in their record collections?

Ah, I can't fault In Rainbows, really - a much better start-to-finish experience for me than Hail To The Thief, without a doubt!

Whereas for me Hail To The Thief is their best overall album.

What, their parents didn't have one of those multi million-selling Pink Floyd albums in their record collections?

haha yes this was exactly my reaction, I was baffled

I can't understand any Radiohead fan saying they like OKC and In Rainbows the least btw.

I dont have time right now, but maybe later if youre interested, dog latin I can bash together a brief rundown explicating the hows and whys of my personal Radiohead albums ranking

Pavement over Cornershop for me. Have to concede I rarely play BTC now, but I think it was underrated then and now, especially "We Are Underused," probably their best "fuck it let's go big" song -- so big, so sad, so final. "Transport is Arranged" almost as good, almost as ignored by history. This Cornershop record wasn't actually a part of my 1997, I bought a used CD of it much later, not really knowing what it was, and fell in love with it.

But the truth is, I think Pavement, Cornershop, and the Verve are the only three of these I've heard all the way through, and I remember nothing about the Verve record except the single. I feel like I was listening to a lot of music in 1997 but I guess somehow not this music?

Where is Wu-Tang Forever? I remember this coming out and being AN EVENT, thought of as an instant classic. I listened to it a lot. Is it now forgotten? OK, I see it's at #37 on the Acclaimed list. So not forgotten, exactly, but -- not remembered to the extent people anticipated remembering it?

Where's Voyage To The Bottom Of The Road? This list is INCREDIBLE! It has no CREDIBILITY!

Side note re: Zaireeka, my brother got a version of the album off eBay that was mixed down onto one CD, and it was definitely not as interesting as getting our youth group to play it off four cheap boomboxes in a church basement.

I remember this coming out and being AN EVENT, thought of as an instant classic.

it was and it is