Acclaimed Music Top 30 Albums from 1997 poll

^^^

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

Shout out for that David Holmes record, which is actually called "Lets Get Killed". Voted Daft Punk.

F#A#& (sic) was very early 1998 I thought?

Says on Wiki that F♯A♯∞ was released in August 1997 (on Constellation) and then again in June 1998 (on Kranky).

I've played OK Computer back to front more times than I can count, but I haven't done so in years and think I would probably get physically ill if I did so today. It's too cold and bitter for me to stomach these days (I was going to call it "dour and smug," but that probably better describes Thom Yorke than the music...). Voted Built to Spill, whatever.

I was still recovering from Grunge/Alt Rock/Bush/Live in 1997, didn't grow to appreciate all these albums till like 2002.

Yo La Tengo.

great post on first exposure to spiritualized scik mouthy!

I thought I had heard a bit of everything when I got around to LAGWAFIS but was still blown away

lol at the thought that your parent's pink floyd records would have made you immune to grandiose psychrock

I somehow missed Dig Me Out. That album was huge for me, arriving as it did about a year after my college riot grrrl friend opened my eyes to an entire wing of music that I was previously unaware of. Still don't know if it trumps Yo La in terms of staying power for me, though.

my actual favorite 1997 record is probably stars of the lid - the ballasted orchestra

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.

― Gristly Bear (Old Lunch), Thursday, 13 August 2015 21:32 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah but it's the SAME fucking albums that get polled every time, this is just such a boring exercise

i think it's funny when people get mad a canonized list. they can never satisfy everyone but you can usually pick one that you love or loved.

at

in this case i can pick about 10 and it is fun to talk about a year of music in a thread...

where's your list imago?

Thing is, imago, if there's no consensus, there's no conversation. Not all conversations about music are geared around the discovery of new music, nor should they be; sometimes people want a bit of nostalgia, and that's fine, or to understand the past they experienced better, and that's fine too. You seem to be interested in always finding an alternative past and exploring that, at all costs - and that's totally valid, too, but it's not what this thread is about. If this thread was polling albums no one had ever heard of, or if everyone was only talking about obscure gems that they liked, there'd be no shared experience, and no point. If you want another discussion, start a "lost gems from the mid 90s" thread, or something.