commercially disappointing major label rock/alternative albums of 1996

glancing at acclaimed music if i was voting p&j that year i'd have emperor tomato ketchup, reasonable doubt, walking wounded, millions now living, new adventures in hi-fi, horse stories, pre-millenium tension, cubist castle, atliens, labradford in some order.

<3 that dirty three album so much

i didn't love the Jon Spencer joint...nothing like as good as Extra Width/Orange

i'm kind of fond of it, different energy than the earlier records but kind of cool and unhinged in the way it careens from one song to the next.

i think i was somewhat disappointed in it at the time and then that disappointment got retroactively compounded by acme

oh Acme is a total fall off

Horse Stories is one of my favorite albums. '96 was a pretty good year for stuff that flew slightly under the radar.

yeah Acme was no bueno. bleh

i always smile when cibo matto pops up on someone's ipod in the lab

wanna hear about balls' lab

we listened to tragic kingdom in the lab the other day, somehow it (or just no doubt in general i'd guess) came up so we decided to put it on. i know it's been noted but god cd glut is really the marker for that era, it was ridiculous how long that album was and unlike some cd glut era albums where the sprawl works for it (eg hi-fi for me at least) here it just became ridiculous. was shocked that there wasn't quite as skacore air to it as i remembered, 'sunday morning' and 'don't speak' still sounded great (as if 'don't speak' every really left radio anyway), 'excuse me mister' sounded alot weirder than i recalled, other than the minimum ska the rest was pretty much how i imagined, much better than its rep at the time (or even now probably right?) but still not so great that it didn't provide the baseline for both the subsequent albums to be better (well judging by the singles at least).

lol xpost

god i swear i'll look at a post i've just made and see grammar and spelling errors that just mystify me, i'll look at it and think 'o look, that's alzheimer's. there's alzheimer's creeping in. *adds piracetam to shopping cart*'.

if i count all the time in coffee shops since 1996 i wonder if endtroducing isn't the album i've heard most in my life

Tragic Kingdom reminded me at the time (pre-"Don't Speak" ubiquity) of Faith No More, for some reason. I'd have to hear it again to know whether that comparison holds up.

aw man I love Tragic Kingdom start to finish. Much as I love them I've never found that they repeated the consistency of that first album. imo.

what i like on endtroducing i like alot but i bet like 35-40% of the vote it got was dickweeds slapping themselves on the back for agreeing w/ 'why hip-hop sucks in 96'. which wow does that title look even dumber now, like if frank zappa had recorded a track called 'why rock albums suck in 67' and then the only lyric was 'it's the drugs!', that level all time RONG.

Yo balls, Tragic Kingdom was in regular rotation for me when I worked a temporary shelving job at UGA Libraries following the great library fire of ought four, I got moderately into it and I do think the highs are pretty high. Staggering to realize it officially had SEVEN SINGLES according to wikipedia but obviously around three of those were non-starters. I dunno if it's THAT overstuffed at 14 tracks but definitely it could shed two and it'd be no big loss. Or three, or four. Looking at the tracklist I'm struggling to remember anything beyond some bits of chorus about the last four songs, and I listened to this thing a LOT. First ten are pretty solid though - - - competent uptempo ska-rock-whatever album with a few huge highlights.

The mid-90s is one of those times when you sort of wish the album had never been developed as a format and people just had singles to stake their rep on. I mean, "Spiderwebs," "Just A Girl," "Sunday Morning" - there was great material on this record!

"Sunday Morning" is so great. i always like the least successful single off of each No Doubt/Stefani record the most.

lol i think part of it may have been just me and another worker going 'fucking hell how long does it take to get to 'sunday morning' already???' and then after 'don't speak' going 'fucking hell there's four more songs on this thing'. it still sounded fine, i'll take it over ratm and sublime, nevermind 311 (aka 'why altrock sucks in 96').

the fact that i grew up thinking 12 track albums were the norm and 14-15 is like awesome bonus is so fucked up and wrong, i'm glad i saw the light eventually

I loved "No Diggity."

I've never owned it on any format

whiney how hyped were you for that blackstreet/odb/slash/fishbone joint

it was my everything

311

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnPntwwxuq8&ob=av2n

still suprised tom gave that a '10' on popular tbh

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDkhl-CgETg

boy america got the better of that deal

love the extras in the spacehog video - 'ok guys it's the 90s, just stand around and look like bored assholes.'

There are a lot of people out there who really like Spacehog I gotta say, enough that I've always been sort of barely curious to dig beneath "In The Meantime" and "Mungo City." Although the memory of OG Pitchfork's scathing takedown of their Chinese Album or whatever it was called has always sort of put me off.

balls, you probably remember athens band Boulevard - - - at one point they had a guitarist who was just ALL about the Spacehog dude, who I want to call...Royston? Royston Sinclair?

barring a couple of weird al videos i'm not sure any video ever made me laugh as immediately and as hard as this one did in 1996
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bYj2o7y4rk

haha "tattva" is kind of a jam imo

I think I have finally, painfully, given up on defending Kula Shaker. You were all right, all along! But the hours spent spinning K endlessly while working through the first Tomb Raider on PC will remain sacred to me.

That Spacehog album was fucking awful. Just, y'know, fyi. I can send you the tape if your curiosity remains unshakable.

are you talking about benj1 burt0n??? i actually hang w/ that dude. never really listened to boulevard, a little after i stopped really paying attention to local music (was never the same after jeremy barnes moved). you know who was the huge spacehog fan is stipe. i've always had a slight curiosity to check out anything else by spacehog but really i'm fine only knowing one song by them but really loving that one song. i only know three songs by the grass roots but really love those three songs. maybe it'll be something like the turtles where when i do finally delve deeper i'll wonder what took me so long, but in the meantime...

no, no, not benj but one of their other members along the way - - - possibly w1nst0n but my memory is shaky.

essentially spacehoggery (?):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8Rwvwu3RrE&ob=av3e

what blackstreet/odb slash fiction joint?

STILL LOVE THIS SONG FWIW - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDHd-vxcMDo

PPL OF ATHENS I WILL BE SINGING THIS SONG THURSDAY AT KARAOKE.

my sister says she was in a spacehog video. i've never watched one, so i don't know whether or not this is true.

i'm gonna start calling liv tyer "the spacehag"

I am so pissed off to be reminded of "Mungo City"

― da croupier, Thursday, September 13, 2007 4:58 PM Bookmark

^^^ pops into my head every time i think of Spacehog now

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6YkVlI5VSU

also not to be a self-plugger but if you are digging on kula shaker, mungo city and "fix" this may be the thread for you: 50 Memorable Songs Of The Late 1990s That Apparently Only You Remember, Even Though They Were Totally On The Radio And Stuff

I finally took a look at 1996's albums in my music and I'm a little bowled over. Here's the list of everything alternative-ish that wasn't represented in the poll and that I'll stump for (to varying degrees) and largely still listen to and enjoy:

A Minor Forest - Flemish Altruism
Aphex Twin - Richard D. James
Fiona Apple - Tidal
Baby Fox - A Normal Family
Bardo Pond - Amanita
Beck - Odelay
Belle & Sebastian - If You're Feeling Sinister and Tigermilk
Butter 08 - S/T
Cardigans - First Band On The Moon
Cat Power - What Would The Community Think
Cibo Matto - Viva! La Woman
Cocteau Twins - Milk and Kisses
Cynthia Dall - (untitled)
Dirty Three - Horse Stories
DJ Shadow - Endtroducing
DJ Spooky - Necropolis
Dr. Octagon - Dr. Octagonecologyst
Eels - Beautiful Freak
Future Sound Of London - Dead Cities
Gastr Del Sol - Upgrade & Afterlife
Lisa Germano - Excerpts From A Love Circus
Girls Against Boys - House of GVSB
Guided By Voices - Under The Bushes, Under The Stars
PJ Harvey & John Parish - Dance Hall At Louse Point
Hayden - Everything I Long For
High Llamas - Hawaii
Illyah Kuryahkin - Count No Count
Imperial Teen - Seasick
Jonathan Fire*Eater - Tremble Under Boom Lights
JSBX - Now I Got Worry
June Of 44 - Tropics & Meridians
Kostars - Klassics With A K
Lamb - S/T
Luscious Jackson - Fever In Fever Out
Mazzy Star - Among My Swan
Takako Minekawa - Roomic Cube
Modest Mouse - This Is A Long Drive For Someone With Nothing To Think About
Morcheeba - Who Can You Trust
NMH - On Avery Island
Ninetynine - S/T
OTC - Dusk At Cubist Castle and Explanation II
Orbital - In Sides
Beth Orton - Trailer Park
Palace Music - Arise, Therefore
Polvo - Exploded Drawing
Rachel's - The Sea And The Bells
Raincoats - Looking In The Shadows
Alex Reece - So Far
Retsin - Egg Fusion
Rome - S/T
Royal Trux - Sweet Sixteen
Sammy - Tales Of Great Neck Glory
Sebadoh - Harmacy
Sleater-Kinney - Call The Doctor
Sloan - One Chord To Another
Smog - The Doctor Came At Dawn and Kicking A Couple Around
Sonora Pine - S/T
Soul Coughing - Irresistable Bliss
Spinanes - Strand
Spoon - Telefono
Stereolab - Emperor Tomato Ketchup
Sugar Plant - Cage Of The Sun
Superdrag - Regretfully Yours
Tortoise - Millions Now Living Will Never Die
Tricky - Pre-Millennium Tension and Nearly God
Underworld - Second Toughest In The Infants
Veruca Salt - Blow It Out Your Ass, It's Veruca Salt
Ween - 12 Golden Country Greats
Wilco - Being There

YMMV with a lot of these albums, but it blows my mind that anyone who was into alternative/indie stuff would consider this a shitty year for music. That's more decent-to-great stuff in a single year than I've probably discovered from the past five years.

1996: In the Meantime vs. Tattva

re: deric's list, i did something similar in the "defend 1996" thread:

12 Favorites:

Sun City Girls - 330,003 Cross-Dressers...
Electric Wizard - Come My Fanatics
Hellacopters - Supershitty to the Max!
Belle and Sebastian - Tigermilk and If You're Feeling Sinister
Outkast - ATLiens
Stereolab - Emperor Tomato Ketchup
John Zorn - Bar Kokhba
Harmony of the Spheres compilation
Bardo Pond - Amanita
Turbonegro - Ass Cobra
Ghostface Killah - Ironman

Other Good Stuff:

2Pac - All Eyez On Me
Arvo Part - Litany
Boris - Absolutego
Brainiac - Hissing Prigs In Static Couture
Butter 08 - Butter 08
Cibo Matto - Year of the Woman
Circle - Zopalki
Country Teasers - Satan Is Real Again
Cryptopsy - None So Vile
De La Soul - Stakes Is High
DJ Spooky - Songs of a Dead Dreamer
Dr. Octagon - Dr. Octagonecologyst and Instrumentalyst
E-40 - Hall of Game
Fatboy Slim - Better Living Through Chemistry
Fu Manchu - In Search of...
fucking racist asshole - Filosofem
Fugees - The Score
Guided By Voices - Tonics & Twisted Chasers and Under the Bushes Under the Stars
Harvey Milk - Courtesy and Goodwill to Men
Imperial Teen - Seasick
Jay-Z - Reasonable Doubt
Jessamine - The Long Arm of Coincidence
Magic Hour - Secession '96
Maxwell - Maxwell's Urban Hang Suite
Melvins - Stag
Mobb Deep - Hell On Earth
MOP - Firing Squad
Neutral Milk Hotel - On Avery Island
Oblivians - Popular Favorites
Olivia Tremor Control - Dusk at Cubist Castle
Sleater-Kinney - Call the Doctor
Sloan - One Chord to Another
Swans - Soundtracks for the Blind
The Brian Jonestown Massacre - Take It From the Man! (and at least one more)
The Chemical Brothers - Live At the Social, Vol. 1
The Fall - Light User Syndrome
The Heads - Relaxing With...
Three 6 Mafia - The End
Tricky - Pre-Millennium Tension
Unwound - Repetition
Weezer - Pinkerton

was a great fucking year

Yeah, and my list dispensed with most the mainstream pop and hip hop from that year. '96 just don't stop.

Also, lest we all forget, '96 also brought us this gem:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1piLRStP7xE

oh man that totally belonged in my poll :-/