Top 50 Most Overrated Electronic Albums

Floating Points

Also never got very far with Hopkins, Arca or Actress for that matter. Filed under "not for me".

Probably stating the obvious but with so much electronic music out there anything that achieves a self-sustaining level of visibility is likely to be relatively 'overrated' to some degree, even if it is actually very good. With a concomitent amount of stuff being underrated, or as is more likely hardly heard at all.

I remember hearing Papa New Guinea and thinking it was pretty cool. was a bit crestfallen to find out right after that it was their big track

my intro to FSOL was via We Have Explosive. still love that one. also FSOL was my entry into Dead Can Dance via that PNG sample.

Tried to listen to Lifedorms recently and CBA with it. Their reworkings of that prog band (um, Syd Arthur) as Amorphous Androgynous a couple of years ago was OK. Playing to their strengths.

Apt typo ;-)

I was hugely into Papua New Guinea in the mid-90s, had the single and played it a lot, but never listened to anything else by FSOL until the 00s. Dunno why! I remember walking into a club as a student and PNG was playing and I had to find out who it was, luckily one of my friends knew it. This would've been at least 2 years after it came out tho, I was never really on the pulse with dance/electronic music, then or now tbh.

stakker humanoid is fsol too amirite? cos that is v klassic

def! that's right up my street that one.

FSOL was kind of big for a minute thanks to AMP, they received a lot of play on there. So did Adam F and Mocean Worker and others of that ilk. best show ever.

papa new guinea is an incredible track, up there w 808 state “pacific”

speaking of which ... never really got into much 808 beyond that beside ”flow coma” and “narcossa”

My controp is electronic music just keeps getting better.
Drop the old canon of aphex- boc. Autechre

Create Yr own canon

i would agree w/r/t bobbins, not so much w/r/t idm

Best Herbert is scale

― Ross, Friday, May 11, 2018 12:55 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Agreed. Scale is one of my favorite albums!

― Evan, Friday, May 11, 2018 2:32 PM (twenty-six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

not to be all drug bro but listening to this on acid with a friend and both of us gradually getting super creeped out by the dread underlying the bright disco surface of the album was a really memorable listening experience

Future Sounds of London are so overrated.

each to their own, but this is so wrong.

Nah man I see you xpost

xp i had the same type of experience listening to phish

re FSOL - I've never listened to anything later than Dead Cities, and I've heard that the later stuff is a bit shit? could that be the reason for the negativity, Moka did say late 90s/early 00s.

That’s when I started listening in. 1999 forwards, of course I listened to their previous record but that scene was nearing its expiry date by the early 00s. Again that’s just my pov. For someone older than me they were probably amazing back in the 90s

re FSOL - I've never listened to anything later than Dead Cities,

FSOL have not released another album of new material since that one (not incl. the various archive releases).
the other albums were released under their AA moniker which is a very different vibe - 60s psych etc.

Looks like The Isness was a Future Sound Of London release in the US?

To everyone to responded to me earlier: thank you - I completely agree! Really getting a kick out of reading this thread.

I started a Top 50 Most Properly Rated TechnoRavers thread if anyone wants to help me. Pretend it's '94, you're working at a record store, and a 14-year-old comes in with a Smashing Pumpkins shirt on talking about the Pavement Cut Your Hair video on MTV and wants to know more about that kind of music. Except, you know, electronic music.

Looks like The Isness was a Future Sound Of London release in the US?

yeah, this was a mess of a release.
they were forced to add the FSOL name to the release I believe in order to get it released.
but its an AA album.

FSOL have not released another album of new material since that one

what are all these "Environments" albums? archival stuff? there's a load of stuff on discogs.

officially they are archive releases.
though I believe one of them was supposedly new material.

some of the early ravey FSOL stuff is awesome. indo tribe, mental cube, "PNG" of course..

papa new guinea is an incredible track, up there w 808 state “pacific”

two things i always get mixed up.

"pacific" is, like, my theme song

FSOL's "Stolen Documents" (I think? It's on Robbie Hardkiss's Mixed Messages mix) is a great early track from them.Accelerator generally is pretty great, though not Frequencies or early Black Dog level.

yeah that’s a good one!

it’s the b side on the png single iirc

If you cut things off at about 1994 so much of the early work of (mostly UK) artists who generally are considered IDM or electronica just sounds like great, smart techno.

yeah true

Jon Hopkins' music does sound like iPhone commercial music (the consonance, tonality and epicness of it), but it does sound good - various rehashing of "Open Eye Signal" - the synthesizer sounds fat/immediate/saturated (filter cutoff gimmick esp.), timbrally sweet. The timbres are sometimes dry and magnified, the rhythms flow easy, and it has that stretching, pulling effect. For the average Radiohead fan, it could be a revelation--roughly the equivalent of somebody beginning to 'recognize' the quality of Autechre's music, but in one shot. It wears thin pretty quickly.

The Campfire Headphase is overrated? I thought that people equated it to Starbucks dining room music.

Kelly Lee Owens
M83
LCD Soundsystem
James Blake

Noooo I love the KLO album

Ricardo Villalobos is shit

DJ Koze too, shit

Ricardo Villalobos is shit

― the article don

the don speaks the truth

agree on koze

villalobos has moments - esp as a dj - but yeah he’s been in a rut and he was overrated to begin with

I mean the heavens didn’t exactly open up for me when I listened to Alcahofa but I’m not going to give anyone flack for having a 10/10 response to it.
Like, what do any of us stand to gain from saying “I like this thing less than the popular consensus” when that stems entirely from personal taste rather than anything inherently hateful about the thing

Other than venting, I suppose. Which I get on some level

we gain satisfaction from trolling u

OVERRATED: The Orb - Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld
UNDERRATED: Irresistible Force - It's Tomorrow Already

mixmaster morris definitely underrated

probably bcz he acts like an ass

my mixmaster morris pick would be global chillage and the one where all the title have the word high in them

Villalobos is awesome listen to some singles for once in your life ffs

Eat some funk

Villalobos himself probably hasn't listened to all the music he's made in the past ten years, and I object on principle to the kind of critical treatment that seeks to elevate him above other dance music producers as some kind of profound rule-breaking genius (though this has receded over about the same period as Villalobos' own output hit total critical mass). But a top twenty productions list (assuming we could all agree on its contents) would be straight fire.

The same is true to varying extents and in different ways for Moodymann, Theo Parrish, Autechre, Aphex Twin, arguably Terre Thaemlitz - all artists who get lauded as iconoclastic auteur geniuses and, well, it's understandable, but it also not my preferred way of thinking about any of them.

DJ Koze in a different category, at least for me: there's a middle stripe of amazing widescreen and inventive dance floor material that he puts out which I think is mindblowing, and then there's the more minimalist material he puts out that I think is fine but not necessarily that distinguishable from other similar producers, and the jokey stuff on the other side which is kind of whatever. I feel like his elevation to near iconoclastic genius category is almost an accident of history, a need to fill a void. It's interesting to imagine an alternate scenario where it wasn't Koze who ended up assuming that role but, I dunno, Kalabrese or someone.

(the obvious actual alternative is Maurice Fulton but I think a lot of people would say "yeah, but he is a genius tho")

middle stripe you mean middle brow

haha sure if you like

i think you are mostly otm except come on theo parrish really is a one of a kind madman