commercially disappointing major label rock/alternative albums of 1996

me and some dude, just a couple of lonely guys thinking about kim thayil.

kim thayil himself is one of us, i believe

that old spin article where thayil zings the shit out of billy corgan makes him in my view maybe the most lovable figure of 90s alt rock

I'm only halfway kidding about the greatest music year. It just so happened that it coincided with my sophomore year in high school, prime radio listening years.

thayil seems like a bro

could play the shit outta the guitar, too

if ship had included '95, yes, King would have been my pick.

underperforming major label debuts are a different category re: Sammy

if either '94-'95 or underperforming major label debuts get polled I will be v agonised between King, You'd Prefer an Astronaut, Speed is Dreaming, Pony Express Record

from this list I guess it's Dust, Hi-Fi or Pele but eh

that old spin article where thayil zings the shit out of billy corgan makes him in my view maybe the most lovable figure of 90s alt rock

as a 14y/o girl I found the article where Thayil declares "we don't make music for 14 year old girls to diddle themselves to" made him one of the least lovable figure of 90s alt rock, but I concede not many people here were 14y/o girls

put me on the list of people who always thought they'd like Afghan Whigs until they actually heard them

haha i know right!

wow thayil was pretty deluded about his lead singer's heartthrob appeal huh

man I wish Thayil was on ILX

Anyways, I would likely vote for King over any of these albums, but do this for '95 and it gets a bit dodgier; that year has a bunch of albums I love to a ridiculous degree. I really have been coming to a slow realization that 95-00 might have been one of those great epochs in music...

This poll has inspired me to finally check out those Posies and Pearl Jam albums, both of which are well overdue for a listen from me...

ok nm re Thayil

maybe we can use this thread as a noms thread for a '95 poll, feel free to list any that come to mind and i'll put the thread together at some point

in any list of disappointing alt rock albums from '95 I would vote for Pacer

Hum - You'd Prefer an Astronaut! I dunno if it was really ever expected to do well though so I will defer to an American on that

(their cultural impact was p. much zero here in the UK, think I heard "Stars" about twice on the radio and just happened to write down its name and remember it when I later saw the album in a bargain bin)

but I wouldn't vote for Hum over Belly so it doesn't matter anyway (oh, I forgot about Pacer)

okay the first song off of Amazing Disgrace--"Daily Mutilation"--is kicking all kinds of ass

yes that album is a bit of an ass kicker.

Dust without a second thought.

Hum's cultural impact in the states was also roughly zero, spacecadet. "Stars" got some decent play on alternative radio, but that was about it. I don't even remember there being a video, so I can't imagine expectations were super high. Good album, though. And yet another (like Sammy's) that I bought largely thanks to some weird pricing experiment back then wherein labels were selling certain albums by 'fresh faces' for about half the usual album price. It was the same deal with the Kids soundtrack, iirc. Found some good stuff via that experiment!

"Stars" was a pretty big hit. Howard Stern made a big deal of having them come on the show and play it! And even when Downward Is Heavenward came out, 120 Minutes hyped up the premiere of the first video.

i think the correct answer here is Weezer, but i have a wild hair up my ass to give the nod to either REM or Afhan Whigs.

i think having a wild hair up your ass would seem to dictate that you vote for afghan whigs, even if i'd prefer that you vote for rem

And I second or third or fourth whoever said this was, like, the greatest era for music (although, obviously, this particular list isn't exactly indicative of the era's riches). Mmmmmmaybe not objectively, but the stuff I listened to/discovered ca. '92-'96 was hugely influencial and a surprising amount of it still holds up now that my rose-tinted glasses have crumbled into dust.

haha some dude, that puts me in a spot of bother. i think i'll go with Afghan Whigs??

Re: "Stars", maybe I just never got a sense of its impact. Aside from my own copy of the album, I don't think I ever heard it anywhere but my local alt rock station, so I guess I just figured Hum were on par with, like, the Refreshments or Seven Mary Three in terms of fame/cultural impact.

(And yes, for anyone who's thinking it, I'm talking about pre-Kng of the Hill Refreshments.)

heh yeah "Stars" was not as big as "Cumbersome," unfortunately.

I always felt like "Cumbersome" was written sometime between the point when Seven Mary Three discovered the word 'cumbersome' and the point when they fully grasped its meaning.

lol otm

hahahah

Thayil Spin interview, for posterity

LOLs from this still as fresh as the day they were printed...

A couple of days and a harrowing plane flight later, the band makes it to a resort town called Surfer's Paradise, which is more or less the Miami Beach of Australia, a skinny coastal town about an hour south of Brisbane, pounded by waves and plagued with jellyfish, crowded with high-rise hotels popular with JApanese honeymooners. Surfer's Paradise is the jumping-off point for the Big Day Out tour, a sort of Australian Lollapalooza that Soundgarden will headline this year. In the lobby bar of one of the tallest hotels, Cornell and Thayil are settling back with a couple of beers when Billy Corgan from Smashing Pumpkins wanders through, and decides to join them for a strawberry margarita. Corgan chatters about the pain of his life, the supposed incompetence of his band (everybody rolls their eyes), the lifesaving virtues of Jungian therapy, bands that suck. Cornell gets up to leave. Corgan tells Thayil how important Soundgarden used to be to him, and he baits him by saying that the Pumpkins sometimes do a cover of Soundgarden's "Outshined" that segues into a Depeche Mode song or something.

"I'm thinking of making my next album really new wave," Corgan says, "like '83-'84 new wave, not like Berlin. I spend all my time doing things that may be a bit tangential, but I think I'm going to go back to the core, the heart music. Echo and the Bunnymen."

This is standard stuff to anybody who has read even a single Billy Corgan profile, the basic curriculum of Pumpkins 101. But Thayil isn't buying. He's sore.

"Don't you see," Thayil says, "you're this incredibly talented guy. People like your music. You have a good band. You sell a lot of records. You don't need all this...stuff."

"What sign are you?" Corgan asks.

"What do you mean, what sign am I?" Thayil says. "What difference could that possibly make?"

"C'mon," wheedles Corgan, "when is your birthday?"

"All right, goddamn it: September 4th."

"Aha!" Corgan says. "A Virgo. You're argumentative."

"Damn right, I'm argumentative," Thayil says, and takes a long, angry pulll at his beer, "which you should know because I've been arguing with you for half an hour, not because of any sign."

"I'm a Pisces," Corgan replies. "We pick up on those things."

A minute later, Corgan, still probing, finally finds the key to Thayil's heart: "I hate how in magazine pictures, they always stick me somewhere in the back."

Thayil explodes: "What do you mean? You write all the songs, and you do all the interviews. You play the instruments on the album. You control the band to the extent that most people think of Smashing Pumpkins as the Billy Corgan Experience, and all you care about is some photograph?"

"But I hate it," Corgan says, "it means they don't think I'm the cute one."

"Ooh," Thayil says a little too loudly as Corgan walks away, "I'll bet he's going to call his therapist in Chicago, wake her up at four in the morning, and tell her about that big, mean bear who made fun of him."

The next day at the Big Day Out festival, Thayil is talking to Kim and Kelley Deal in the Breeders' dressing room when Corgan walks past wearing a long-sleeved Superman T-shirt like the one your four-year-old nephew probably owns.

"You hurt me deeply," Corgan says, touching the giant S on his chest and pouting. "You hurt me deeply in my heart." The Pumpkins go on to play the best set anybody has ever heard them play, their usual passiveness and precision overlaid with an unfamiliar scrim of anger that throws their music into brilliant relief.

oops here's the link to the full article too

http://web.stargate.net/soundgarden/articles/spin_4-94.shtml

wkiw Thayil

man 90s indie rock/punk major label debuts would be a motherfucker of a poll.

oh my god that's amazing

makes me want to get into Soundgarden tbh

Am 85% sure I could post a scan of that. PS, anybody wanna buy a bunch of old SPINs?

Not sure how well Brutal Youth sold, but I do remember hearing "13 Steps Lead Down" on the local "alternative" station and it was actually the song that first got me interested in Costello (I was 14).

Still think All This Useless Beauty is one of the most underrated records in his catalogue and it gets my vote easily, though it might be worth mentioning that I've always had significant trouble giving a shit about Weezer.

dan i kinda cant believe you're NOT into soundgarden

The next day at the Big Day Out festival, Thayil is talking to Kim and Kelley Deal in the Breeders' dressing room when Corgan walks past wearing a long-sleeved Superman T-shirt like the one your four-year-old nephew probably owns.

ok, Kim Thayil, all is forgiven (except everything I've heard from the Soundgarden reunion)

A minute later, Corgan, still probing, finally finds the key to Thayil's heart: "I hate how in magazine pictures, they always stick me somewhere in the back."

Thayil explodes: "What do you mean? You write all the songs, and you do all the interviews. You play the instruments on the album. You control the band to the extent that most people think of Smashing Pumpkins as the Billy Corgan Experience, and all you care about is some photograph?"

"But I hate it," Corgan says, "it means they don't think I'm the cute one."

http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRQGWMHy4_gTA3lpIUmLZFWhT-YwjraukTQFgoZzHcLDgFW1LO9l9A7XAWm

xxp: I do like "Black Hole Sun" but that's really the only thing by them I know (besides "Spoonman", lol)

Jealous of you Dan --- you got some fun ahead if you're gonna give into Soundgarden.

Their reunion show last year sent me diving back into Superunknown, which I thought I didn't like...turns out I was RONG
Like a Suicide, Day I Tried To Live, Head Down...holy shit

Black Hole Sun is still the worst though
god I hate it

Soundgarden's heyday was right when I was at the peak of my raverraver listening, where the only things I listened to that weren't in the 140+ BMP range were Cure, TKK and NIN albums

This may have been the greatest year in the history of music.

― Jeff, Friday, May 4, 2012 4:34 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

when i started looking back at '96 and eventually getting the idea for this thread, i started out going "wow, 1996 has the highest concentration of albums i like of any year ever," but then i realized i didn't really love many of those albums, and not nearly as many as for '95 or '94

― some dude, Friday, May 4, 2012 6:13 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

96 was a great year. there's even a thread about it. (that links to a list of fifty-some albums from '96 that i love, thread in general = defend 1996.)

the idea that it might have been a bad year is bizarre to me. a year of declining fortunes for major label "alternative rock", maybe, but that's something for marketing execs to worry about.

Much as it pains me to admit it, I love this thread idea because it solidifies the context for one of the greatest singles of the 1990s: Local H's "All the Kids are Right."

Never heard of St. Johnny until today. Not bad. Kotton kandy Sonic Youth with an endearingly bad singer who could still use more feedback around him. But check these titles from Speed Is Dreaming which epitomize alt's short shelf life:

A Car Or A Boy?
I Hate Rock And Roll
Down The Drain
I Give Up
What Was I Supposed To See?
The Devil's Last Stand
You're Not My Friend
You Can't Win
Gran Mal
Everything Is Beautiful
Black Eye
Turbine
Stupid

Fact: The greatest and third greatest albums of the 1990s were released this year (Endtroducing... and Call the Doctor).

Fact!

Their reunion show last year sent me diving back into Superunknown, which I thought I didn't like...turns out I was RONG
Like a Suicide, Day I Tried To Live, Head Down...holy shit

yeah, love soundgarden to death up through superunknown ("the day i tried to live" <-- holy shit). it's only with down on the upside that i start to have doubts. though the avengers track kind of sucks, i still have my fingers crossed for the new one.

oh how could the new one not suck.

chris cornell has been a shit farmer for way too long now

xxpost Down on the Upside is not great. Ty Cobb is okay, and Blow Up The Outside World. But def pale compared to Superunknown...you could kinda tell they were pretty much done

and yeah, Cornell's kinda burned his bridges with me as far as new stuff goes

that Billie Jean cover, I mean

RAGE

and that horrible Timbaland solo album was just...whut