Acclaimed Music Top 30 Albums from 1991 poll

It's no Spirit of Eden, but once I saw Laughing Stock, I knew nothing would beat it.

One significant reason why Nevermind is great and Ten is garbage is the average tempo on Nevermind is literally about 30 bpm faster.

Ten is my least favorite PJ album because of that. I'm okay with slow songs, even some of PJ's slow songs, but half of Ten is just this dirgey wavy plodding goop. I was really glad when Vs. came out so I had a PJ album I prefer to Ten.

is Blue Lines really that good? when i saw that is was the 37th best album ever i sort of took notice, i do own Mezzanine and really like it but not on this kind of level.

Yeah, I'm not as crazy about it. '91 seems to be the year of albums whose follow-ups I'm way more into. I love Protection and U.F.Orb and am comparatively more fond of Incesticide/In Utero and Vs.. There was a time when Automatic For The People was my favorite REM album, and while that isn't true anymore, I do think it tops Out Of Time just a smidge in terms of having fewer songs which tarnish the overall greatness of the album.

Blue Lines is probably only my third favourite album on this list after Loveless and Achtung Baby, and I certainly wouldn't call it the 37th best album of all time or anywhere even close to that, but it is still pretty damn great in case you've avoided ever hearing it until now. Protection and Mezzanine are probably more fully developed albums in terms of the consistency of their overall sound, while BL takes detours into pop-reggae (for example), but it remains the record (thanks in large part to "Unfinished Sympathy," sure) that I'm most likely to pop in whenever I'm in a mood to listen to Massive Attack.

i feel like even Pearl Jam has quietly admitted that the production on Ten sucks, via never working with its producer again, and having the producer of most of their other albums remix it for the reissue. even the drummer that left shortly after the album was recorded just has a cheesier stadium rock feel than their later drummers. "Porch" still rules but a lot of the album i can take or leave now, and i say that even though it was the first album i ever really loved.

is Blue Lines really that good?

Yes.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

where is the Electronic album?

here are the next 15:

31 The Jesus Lizard - Goat
32 Lenny Kravitz - Mama Said
33 Saint Etienne - Foxbase Alpha
34 Simply Red - Stars
35 American Music Club - Everclear
36 Mercury Rev - Yerself Is Steam
37 P.M. Dawn - Of the Heart, of the Soul and of the Cross: The Utopian Experience
38 Electronic - Electronic
39 Julian Cope - Peggy Suicide
40 Sonny Sharrock - Ask the Ages
41 Sebadoh - III
42 The Wedding Present - Seamonsters
43 Smashing Pumpkins - Gish
44 Seal - Seal
45 Young Disciples - Road to Freedom

oh man, Goat is probably better than any of the albums in the top 30.

Forgot Ask the Ages came out in '91. Would've voted for that over everything else in the top 45 easy.

Of the Heart, of the Soul and of the Cross: The Utopian Experience would have offered a serious challenge to my already tense Loveless vs. Achtung vs. Blue Lines struggle.

voted Cypress Hill, not sure if it's really my favorite (tbh that's probably Out of Time) but the Cypress Hill was pretty important to me as a Latino, def no Gerardo ish, plus that Duke of Earl sample is like the all-time-est

Forgot Ask the Ages came out in '91. Would've voted for that over everything else in the top 45 easy.

― Montgomery Burns' Jazz (Tarfumes The Escape Goat),

ditto

'91 is a strange year for me in that I was probably just a year or so too young to really appreciate it at the time. I started high school in the Fall of '92, so a lot of these albums were in the periphery of my awareness without actually being things I listened to yet. Within a year or two of their release, Achtung Baby and Of the Heart... were among the most frequently played albums in my admittedly small personal CD collection. My sister owned Nevermind and Ten, and anyways the weren't albums that a kid starting high school needed to personally own in the early 90s in order to hear them everywhere (ditto Blood Sugar Sex Majik, which, at least at my school, seemed to rival both Nirvana and PJ in popularity). Blue Lines, Loveless and Bandwagonesque were things I wouldn't discover for myself until either the very end of high school or in my early university days. So while I get that 1991 was indeed a "monster year," it is still one that I can only appreciate through several layers of distance, not completely unlike, say, 1966 or 1977 or something.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Heh!

No Gish, eh?

To be quite honest, I might have voted for Gish if it had been there.