Acclaimed Music Top 30 Albums from 1997 poll

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

No Pink Floyd in my house growing up! Not that I've heard any Floyd like Cop Shoot Cop.

A Saucerful Of Secrets does the long-form order -> chaos -> order thing quite well. Fuck I'm writing a serious post in this thread

Interstellar Overban

If this list represents 1997's music to you in anything like a satisfactory manner then frankly I pity you and your shit taste. This sort of consensus canon-forming is the enemy of all good historical music appreciation and it makes me extremely uneasy to see so many of you buying into it

in spite of experiencing a youth where the boombox experiment was like the ne plus ultra of social events i will never willingly listen to the flaming lips again. ok computer was a huge album for me for a long time but this is so easily homogenic now.

If this list represents 1997's music to you in anything like a satisfactory manner then frankly I pity you and your shit taste. This sort of consensus canon-forming is the enemy of all good historical music appreciation and it makes me extremely uneasy to see so many of you buying into it

not everyone can achieve the artistic purity of singing "Bohemian Rhapsody" while diddling a vacuum cleaner

OK, maybe 'shit taste' is making things a little personal and mean, but cmon, this is the sort of thing which gets good artists forgotten beneath a horrid swathe of canonical classics! And I say this as someone who has at some stage of their life liked or loved probably half the albums here!

Generally, I agree with you that consensus canon-forming can lead to a number of great releases getting forgotten about or glossed over, but the thread is called "Acclaimed Music Top 30 Albums from 1997 poll" not "30 Sadly Neglected Albums from 1997 poll"

think a good deal of my antipathy towards this does stem from the fact that of the albums i've liked from here, i'm over just about all of them - and subsequent 1997 discoveries just give me so much more

if i were to validate the poll by voting in it i'd probably go with portishead, although the mogwai and the sfa are still quite good maybe. but argh NO

Chemicals for me. Not sure how well it's aged, though.

gotta go with LCW

think a good deal of my antipathy towards this does stem from the fact that of the albums i've liked from here, i'm over just about all of them - and subsequent 1997 discoveries just give me so much more

― imago, Thursday, August 13, 2015 9:01 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Well yeah, I fully understand what you mean... there's loads of albums on this list that I played the absolute shit out of back in the '90s that I know full well are good records, but because I've played 'em that many times I seldom feel like listening to 'em. There's a few albums on this list that I'd love to be able to listen to with completely "fresh" ears again, but because I know every single nook and cranny of some of 'em, they just don't hit my "pleasure centre" in the way that they once did.

LJ, I think you're the only person here who thinks anyone else here would mistake this list for a canonical survey of 1997's best and brightest. We're polling a list of albums. That's all.

Gravitar - Now the Road of Knives
ST37 - Spaceage
The Fall - Levitate
OOIOO - s/t
Strange Warmings of Laddio Bolocko
Acid Mothers Temple - s/t
Dissolve - Third Album from the Sun
Bardo Pond - Lapsed
Helium - The Magic City
Davis Redford Triad - The Mystical Path of the Number Eighty Six
The Sea and Cake - The Fawn
Janet Jackson - The Velvet Rope

I'm on #teamimago for this one, just sayin

By this year I was well out of touch with most new music, and not much on this list made any impression on, me except for Pavement, which was a pleasant surprise after the disappointing Wowee Zowee. Brighten the Corners is still my favorite Pavement album to listen to, though to be honest, I don't play it that often.

Did F♯A♯∞ come out in 1997, or am I going bananas? If it did, that would be no.1. As it is, either Young Team or Ladies and Gentlemen... for me.

Edit: or Bad Timing by Jim O'Rourke.

That Davis Redford Triad album is amazing

^yes