latepassapedia: records that were light years better the ones indie dudes eventually endorsed as classics

clicked hoping this would be a great thread, lasted about 10 posts before scrolling past everything quickly & smdh the whole way. btw the bug's pressure is a great record but the critics are right (even if they were also late)-- london zoo is leagues better

ed 3 on the money; I wz thinking "high fives on planet future" as a possible new sn

high suggestbans on planet weingarten

Nostalgia, Ultra

i like it when you sleep, for you are so beautiful yet so unaware of it

it doesn't really fit the "light years better" qualifier but i couldn't resist lol

very few of these examples will truly fit the "light years better" qualifier (imo), but it's still a good thread idea, shout out to WGW for linking to it.

Does the phenomenon of revisionist hipster classics still exist in any strength? It seems like streaming services have lessened the weight of particular reissues.

Neil Young - Landing On Water
Bob Dylan - Under a Blood Red Sky
David Bowie - Never Let Me Down

Landing on Water rather than which record?

Beyoncé, 4

Also the first Kacey Musgraves album

this is like the bizarro New Jersey or something, right?

Orbus Terrarum

Beyoncé, 4

― 5th Ward Weeaboo (Whiney G. Weingarten), Thursday, November 29, 2018 1:36 PM (one hour ago)

beyonce, b'day

whilst kacey m should have been receiving plaudits from the first record on... it's definitely debatable whether the first record (which is amazing) is light years better than this year's LP

Miranda Lambert- Kerosene

I'd say Amerie's All I Have except that IIRC it was less the follow-up album as a whole that was endorsed as a classic than it was "1 Thing" specifically. Similar issue with Kelis' Kaleidoscope versus "Milkshake"/Tasty.

I was thinking about whether this happens a lot in dance / electronic music and it seems actually not very common? I suspect because typically there's usually such a run-up to actual full length albums by artists in that field that, typically, by the time the debut album actually comes out, it's either already a disappointment vis a vis the artist's earlier work or, if it's any good, the portion of the music crit community that pays any attention to dance music at all is fairly well-placed to endorse it as a classic pretty quickly, or it's a bit of both of those things.

Against that, the first/best actual example I can think of is probably Isolee's Rest versus Wearemonster.

thread premise is decent but I'm not sure why indie rock should be excluded (and yes also the lightyears is prob unnecessary hyperbole) so anyway:

Julien Baker - Sprained Ankle
Bon Iver - For Emma, Forever Ago

*HANDS UP THREAD POLICE*

the Bon Iver album was absurdly highly acclaimed by critics. It's the cornerstone of his foundation myth

nope it was overlooked the year it was released and then a sleeper hit next year, but p4k put the disappointing follow up in the #1 spot on their aoy list

no indie rock itt pls respect thread rules

aight but just out of curiosity are the thread rules completely idiosyncratic or is there a reason why relatively underrated indie rock records would be less interesting than rap records?

since classic rock is apparently not disqualified: Revolver

I was thinking about whether this happens a lot in dance / electronic music and it seems actually not very common?

It mostly happens in reverse, everyone is desperate to jump on the first record and the second is often dismissed as being predictable by comparison, even when it's better. I'm thinking about the hosannas that greeted the first Galcher Lustwerk tape and now no one seems to give a shit when he releases an album. Also the stratospheric praise for the first Martyn album compared with the relatively muted reception for the (far superior) Ghost People.

Landing on Water rather than which record?

Ragged Glory, probably.

aight but just out of curiosity are the thread rules completely idiosyncratic or is there a reason why relatively underrated indie rock records would be less interesting than rap records?

The whole point is that a lot of indie listeners understand and listen to other genres less than standard indie rock, about the elements of the music they tend to latch onto, and how that differs from what people more immersed in the genre might latch onto. By contrast 'X indie record is overrated/underrated by indie fans' is not an especially interesting debate.

A more interesting counterpoint would be the kinds of indie rock records that rap or pop listeners tend to gravitate towards/hail as classics, but that's a different thread.

I mean it's a lame, smug concept for a thread but within that, excluding indie rock records makes sense.

A more interesting counterpoint would be the kinds of indie rock records that rap or pop listeners tend to gravitate towards/hail as classics, but that's a different thread.

― Matt DC, Friday, November 30, 2018 7:22 AM (fourteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

https://www.ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?boardid=77&threadid=81488

you’ll never guess who started that one!

nope it was overlooked the year it was released and then a sleeper hit next year, but p4k put the disappointing follow up in the #1 spot on their aoy list

this is a weird way to look at canon construction. initial reception is often at odds to how things ultimately get sorted out. Like "Don't Tell a Soul" got a lot more attention/reviews at the time than any previous Replacements album, but nobody thinks of that as their canonical record.

Against that, the first/best actual example I can think of is probably Isolee's Rest versus Wearemonster.

― Tim F, Thursday, November 29, 2018 4:33 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Wearemonster was the first thing that came to mind rereading this thread

Also probably Herbert - scale (and maybe several times going backwards)

Yeah Around The House > Bodily Functions also works.

I suppose some hardcore early fans would take it back even earlier.

There's another wrinkle to this thread that I think that Bon Iver doesn't fit, which is that the critical hosannas for the follow-up pretend or assume that people don't need a late-pass, that this X album is the classic. Rather than "we didn't get to the previous album until recently and hey isn't it amazing? Also this follow-up is very good."

I already regret getting into this but his first album was #29 on Pitchfork's 2007 EOY list. Sure they were overcompensating with their reaction to the second one, but they certainly didn't overlook the debut

Kevin I can't see the thread you're linking to but my immediate guess was the Goon Rock thread?

xpost ok but Bon Iver's top track on Spotify is from For Emma, even though that record came out in the pre-Spotify era. I think that album's reputation slightly eclipses the follow-up's. P4K eoy ranking be damned.

also P4K had For Emma at #29 on the 00s Best of Decade list, higher than most of the records that beat it on the 2007 list, which shows a rising reputation

I agree that Emma is the canonized Bon Iver album and I guess I just saw a parallel in p4k's (and many other media, it topped lotsa eoy lists) reaction to the subpar followup and then the premise of this thread

I see now that it's more about being cooler and more knowledgeable than indie fans abt jazz and hip hop so I'll just remove bookmark

Ice Cube's first few solo albums are superior to SOOC but I don't expect to see them ranking #3 in a p4k 90s list.

the rules don't really matter, and Julien Baker is an excellent call

Ice Cube's 1st two albums are far superior to The Predator but I feel like ppl always talk about that as the classic

well it was his commercial peak, so I guess it stands out for a more general audience

I see now that it's more about being cooler and more knowledgeable than indie fans abt jazz and hip hop so I'll just remove bookmark

― niels, Friday, November 30, 2018 10:28 AM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i get that ppl can get petty / personal about this stuff but i think there are genuinely lots of critics who are just responding to the conversation and then there are critics (and fans) who do the hard work of listening to lots of music & figuring out what people are missing out on and helping to propel that attention, and i don't really see a problem with pointing out where the illusion that 'critical consensus = quality' falls apart. I also don't see how its 'cool chasing' to make these arguments ... most ppl here are pretty invested in music & i dont think there's really that much of ppl being like "damn tim f is wearing a leather jacket & sunglasses when he posts about Herbert what a badass" going on

tim f is a badass who posts in a leather jacket and sunglasses, but not because he posts about herbert

otm

Guys I told you not to share those pics.

i think there are genuinely lots of critics who are just responding to the conversation and then there are critics (and fans) who do the hard work of listening to lots of music & figuring out what people are missing out on and helping to propel that attention, and i don't really see a problem with pointing out where the illusion that 'critical consensus = quality' falls apart.

yeah exactly, and I'd make the further point that just because hypothetical critic A misses the bus on one record that hypothetical critic B was right onto, doesn't mean their roles aren't reversed in respect of another record. I think any critic worth their salt develops a fair amount of humility about how much amazing music being made right now they are not aware of it for the simple reason that it's impossible to be on top of everything. If anything, the more music you consume the stronger that feeling becomes. For my part, I'm just following the conversation in the majority of areas of music I try to check out.

I'm not so interested in the fact that this happens and who was there first as I am in the ways that it can happen. A lot of it comes down to context, and what constellations of other contemporaneous music a record arrives within, and whether that constellation creates a broader sense of momentum that propels and incites people's curiosity.

A recurring feature of several of the suggestions in this thread is that the earlier record that didn't get as many plaudits also didn't really make a huge amount of sense within a critical context at the time of its release, whereas by the time of the follow-up there was a broader attitude of interest generated not merely by the earlier record but by other records.

Isolee is a good example here: "Beau Mot Plage" was a hit within certain house music circles, but otherwise Rest was a knotty record that wouldn't necessarily have seemed representative of anything happening within dance music that was worth talking about more broadly, unless you happened to be paying very close attention to the scene from which it emerged (nb. in June 2000 I certainly wasn't; I only checked it out the next year after Simon Reynolds said it was his album of 2000).

Whereas by 2005, anyone who paid attention to critically feted dance music at all would have been marinated in years of celebrations of microhouse-through-minimal-house, in which context WeAreMonster seemed like An Important Record.

c.f. Luomo's Vocalcity - another mid-2000 record in the same broad style as Rest that lots of people missed initially (I first heard it about a year later) but which is more in the Bon Iver mould of being afforded all those critical hosannas once people did discover it. It's interesting to consider what is the distinguishing feature here; one may be that Vocalcity, like For Emma, Long Ago, doesn't really need a surrounding context in order for its importance/singularity/etc. to be understood or made sense of, it's more in the artist-is-a-genre vein.

Clipse seems like the archetypal example of this whole idea, in part because it's hard to attribute the leap in interest for HHNF relative to Lord Willin' to anything other than changes in the way that mainstream critical attitudes towards rap had shifted between early 2003 and late 2006. The debut was hardly an obscure record, and there's not really anything about the follow-up that suggests that critics were latching onto something different to what they could have latched onto with the debut had they so chosen.

skinny love is kinda the archetypal indie song of its era so it's hard to think of that record as in any way passed over

It always bugs me that Floral Shoppe won all the awards, but Eccojams was the better record by miles - it was obvious at the time that Floral Shoppe was a kind of "consolation prize" that was in the right place at the right time, and of course nowadays vapourwave is a silly joke that has been and gone. But Eccojams has something haunting about it. It has an emotional dimension that vapourwave mostly avoided.

rap seems particularly prone to this as it can seem like a chore to go back and listen to a hip hop album that came out 3 or 4 years ago

I really prefer "Ruins" to any of the later Oneohtrix Point Never things
Beyonce "B'Day" was, in my small world anyway, the album that opened the gates of pop (broadly speaking) to me and my indie friends and everybody put away their Shins records forever
Shostakovich symphonies 5 > 10 > 4 is the consensus but I think but 4 > 10 > 5 is correct
Eno: Green > Jets > Tiger > Science is the consensus but I think Tiger > Jets > Science > Green is correct
Stereolab mk. 1 > McCarthy >> all other iterations

Also:

I say this every three weeks I feel but Fucked Up's "Epics In Minutes" is one of the best albums (compilations) I can think of and towers over "Hidden World" and everything else
(edited because I said this seven years ago already)