Acclaimed Music Top 30 Albums from 1997 poll

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/

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.

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