TURN THIS MUTHA OUT! It's the Alternate 1970s Albums Poll on ILX — Results Thread

Fuck yes, I voted for This Heat & wld have been so sad if they didn't place.

me 2

me 3

not me -1

me 4. it was my #4

I can only imagine the contortions Tuomas's face would go into while listening to the This Heat album.

i didn't but i probably should have.

i have some this heat but not a whole album! it's pretty decent stuff. can we have some more prog now plz. still only one of mine here and it's one i voted for with tactics rather than heartfelt desire in mind

me 5sies

any more today?

Maybe after the football game tonight, but right now I'm getting ready to cook up some burgers on the grill!

I take it you aren't in the middle of a blizzard then.

I'm in Florida (where it's colder than normal, but not snowing at least).

bon appétit!

I didn't think about this much while deciding on my votes, but my ballot breaks down like this, category-wise (and my sense of categories here is shaped by discussion in this thread, so I haven't subdivided pop/rock much except to pull out prog into its own category):

2 funk
1 jazz
5 modern classical (only Music for Airports, which has the most marginal membership in this category, has made it in, and I doubt the rest will appear as high as top 35%)
6 prog
23 rock/pop (one with notable prog tendencies)
3 soul

(one with notable prog tendencies)

Secondhand Daylight? :D

or Rock Bottom? :D

This Heat was my #3

xp
I counted one of those two as flat-out prog

Rock Bottom has no chance of not making this AFAIC.

woooooooo great album

Soft Machine - Third is better obv but who has the patience for a 4-track 75-minute album I ask ya ;-)

mine is like

usa disco/soul/funk 19 [4 placed so far]
modern classical 3 (assuming we're talking p glass/reich)
fela 4
brazil 4
rock 5 [1 so far]

Cool stuff. 12 of mine are here so far, all the boring rock ones. I suck.

only 5 for 40 so far, maybe my ballot was less conventional than i thought, or else ilx is less conventional than people are complaining about

(hatches an almost plausible plan to tell Tuomas that This Heat - "24 Track Loop" was an MTV jungle ident in the mid-90s)
(PS for Tuomas: it was not. at least as far as I know it was not. it is about as close as any Britisher art school types got in the 70s, though)

I kind of thought that Yeti must have a lower score-per-vote than the Cluster or Harmonia albums, but in fact the opposite is true - they have more votes, lower scores. Which is weird to me because when I first got into krauty things Yeti was almost canonical and Cluster/Harmonia were never mentioned, but to me Yeti is pretty patchy and MvH or Zuckerzeit are almost perfect all the way through. But there is no denying "Eye-Shaking King" or "Archangels Thunderbird", so I voted for all three.

Thank you Mr Fever! Digging this so far, looking forward to the rest.

I have been streaming tracks from some of the more unfamiliar albums on grooveshark: Musik von Harmonia, This Heat among others. A poll like this is good for kickstarting explorations into one's musical blindspots if nothing else.

I deliberately didn't try to have quotas - I just tried to honestly pick my favourite 40 records from the list, with the one artist, one album proviso. Looks like I picked 30 Rock/ Pop/ Folk records, 7 soul/ funk, 2 reggae and 1 Brazilian. This doesn't reflect the proportions in my collection, which takes up 7 shelves each with about 350 records: 3 are soul/ RnB/ Hip hop and jazz, 1 is Irish folk, Blues and Latin, 'Easy' and Library and maybe 3 are Rock/ Pop. So is it just that one kind of music fits the album template better?

I kind of thought that Yeti must have a lower score-per-vote than the Cluster or Harmonia albums, but in fact the opposite is true - they have more votes, lower scores. Which is weird to me because when I first got into krauty things Yeti was almost canonical and Cluster/Harmonia were never mentioned

this is weird b.c i wud hav said the xact opposite, but maybe i got into krauty stuff via the more electronic and enoish end

In my mind, krautrock has always had an electronic component that Yeti doesn't have. I don't even really know how to classify Yeti other than "German," because I definitely don't group it in with the likes of Kraftwerk, Cluster, Neu! or whoever else.

(xpost) I think this just means that I am old tbh, in the 90s Harmonia and Cluster were almost forgotten, or at least I read a lot of "hey guyz dig this weird 70s German music" articles about Can or Neu! or maybe Faust if you were lucky that never mentioned them, but yeah

In other Yeti news, I would like to point out that the new vinyl reissue restores "Pale Gallery" to its original 6-minute length for the first time in a long time.

Does anyone know what was going on with the Mystic + Voiceprint + Repertoire Amon Duul 2 CDs?

and that record is solid gold all the way through, boo to whoever dissed those improvs upthread.

Ooh, This Heat! I remember taping their debut Peel session on the night it first aired. Incidentally, Charles Hayward guests on a few tracks on the forthcoming (and excellent) Hot Chip album.

whoah that is great news!!!

the THis HEat Peel Sessions are imo better than the regular LP versions and are available on a CD called Made Available.

35. Tim Buckley - Starsailor (1970) [127 points, 13 votes, 1 first place vote]

http://i46.tinypic.com/24zamma.jpg

The third greatest record ever made. Deathless. Abused. Misunderstood. Misaccepted. Screaming to seduction. Leon Thomas weds Cathy Berberian.

Gender mirror image of this record: "I'm The One" by Annette Peacock.

― Marcello Carlin, Thursday, September 19, 2002 10:23 AM (7 years ago)

The greatest possible thing to come out of fusion, or the worst possible thing to come out of folk?

― dleone (dleone), Thursday, September 19, 2002 10:15 AM (7 years ago)

Ok. The story goes a folkie that starts to get a little jazz mixed into the system (see Lorica) takes it completely into another realm that It's All Over Now, Baby Blue or Puff The Magic Dragon wouldn't dare think of. More IMO a free jazz psychedelia record than folk. This is the one that people either seem to think of Buckley as a musical genius or a total dud. Its weird how some of the folks I know who consider themselves to be huge fans have never or are afraid to listen to this record.

― brg30 (brg30), Thursday, September 19, 2002 3:23 PM (7 years ago)

Be very careful if you listen to Starsailor on acid. Seriously.

― Blightersrock (Da ve Segal), Sunday, July 18, 2004 8:59 PM (5 years ago)

34. Funkadelic - Standing on the Verge of Getting it On (1974) [128 points, 9 votes, 1 first place vote]

http://i48.tinypic.com/1z2fx1v.jpg

Locked in a mortal battle with America... for my favorite first-half-of-the-'70s P-Funk effort. Comparable to Maggot Brain in that the first 2/3 are brilliant ("I'll Stay" is devastating; the title track is one of their best dance songs; "Alice In My Fantasies" is in their hard rock top 3), but it has a better ending ("Jimmy's Got A Little Bit of Bitch In Him" is a hoot and "Good Thoughts, Bad Thoughts" is as good as one could hope from a "Maggot Brain" reprise with psych-religious lyrics).

― Stupornaut (natepatrin), Tuesday, March 29, 2005 11:02 AM (4 years ago)

You've got your heavy-ass guitar shit, your weirdo psych-babble, your funkier groove stuff...it's a pretty nice precis of the early-mid Funkadelic sound.

― Zack Richardson (teenagequiet), Monday, October 25, 2004 7:42 PM (5 years ago)

Standing on the Verge - its kinda the apex of their tighter "rock" period (lolz thx Ron Bykowski) and it doesn't have a weak track on it.

― the taint of Macca is strong (Shakey Mo Collier), Thursday, October 1, 2009 4:26 PM (3 months ago)

I haven't heard that album. I need to!

I haven't either. In fact, my exposure to Funkadelic consists only of Maggot Brain and Free Your Mind. It's long past time for me to be investigating further.

its good rev, way better than maggot brain imo.

where's all the parliament? or was it all buried in the orig 100?

STARSAILOR #1

better than maggot brain!

mothership and funkentelechy (along w/ maggot brain) made the og poll. don't see other parliament albums placing at this point

33. Bruce Springsteen - Born to Run (1975) [128 points, 11 votes, 1 first place vote]

http://i50.tinypic.com/2eft7y9.jpg

I fucking love Born to Run to death....the fuckin' break into "at nite we sweat it out on the streets of a runaway american dream"....fuck yeah it's over the top drama queen theatrics and god bless it....it's one of those songs i instantly loved as a child when i heard it.....it made things seem bigger and more important than they really were.....Coldplay's "Clocks" is prolly like that for little kids now.

I WILL NOT APOLOGIZE!

― M@tt He1geson (Matt Helgeson), Tuesday, January 4, 2005 7:16 PM (5 years ago)

"At night we ride through mansions of glory in suicide machines" gives me goose pimples, for real. And since I've given up the ghost of boring anti-bombast punk purism (a phase which lasted me more or less the couple months in 1994 between hearing Ramones for the first time and hearing London Calling for the first time), I've come to appreciate how well-structured the track is, going beyond just verse-chorus-verse to a perfectly-contained mini-rock-opera that stays completely focused and builds to a completely immaculate peak (the one around the 3-minute-mark, right before the "1-2-3-4/the highway's jammed with broken heroes..."). 9 times out of 10 this personally, for me, beats some snotty kid plonking on the same chords for 2:30, muttering about boredom. Beats it with a tire iron.

― What's this place, Biblevania? (natepatrin), Tuesday, January 4, 2005 7:56 PM (5 years ago)

I hadn't listened to this record in a couple of years, but god, it still sounded great. Actually, I kept getting shivers down my spine when it was playing and it had me close to tears a few times (mostly on "Thunder Road" and "Backstreets.") Listening to this today finally settled an ILM debate for me: Music can never affect me quite as much now as it did when I was a teenager. No record I've heard in the last few years, including Loveless, has had as much affect on me as Born to Run did this morning, and I know it's not just because Born to Run is such a great album. This is a record that got to me when I was young and emotionally vulnerable in a way that I'm not anymore, at the age of 32. I still feel music very deeply and appreciate and enjoy a wider range of music than ever, but music doesn’t completely overpower me the way it did when I was 15. Oh well.

Springsteen is still a big classic, by the way, despite all the incredibly corny lines on Born to Run.

― Mark, Wednesday, January 23, 2002 8:00 PM (7 years ago)

That sleeve, I always thought it was some incredibly fat guy he was leaning on (i.e. facing against Bruce)

haha

The breakdown of my ballot is something like this:

American soul/R&B 9
Jazz 12
Funk 3
African funk/soul 3
Brazilian pop & jazz 8
Disco 3
Afro-Cuban 1
Folk 1

So far Sextant is the only album in my ballot that has showed up. (I would've voted for C'est Chic though, but somehow I missed it on the nomination list.) It's beginning to look like only one or two more will place... :(

mothership and funkentelechy (along w/ maggot brain) made the og poll. don't see other parliament albums placing at this point.

Isn't Chocolate City considered to be the second best Parliament album after Mothership Connection? Though I guess ILX prefers Funkadelic over Parliament, so CC won't probably have a chance anymore.

32. Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band - Lick My Decals Off, Baby (1970) [128 points, 14 votes]

http://i46.tinypic.com/2e3bkm9.jpg

"Lick My Decals Off, Baby" is my favorite Beefheart record. I think it's the most fully-realized concept, and the band is tighter than a mosquito's ass. "Trout Mask" is wilder, but "Decals" is denser and more focused, while retaining the more wacked out rhythmic ideas of its predecessor. "Doctor Dark," the title track, and "I Wanna Find a Woman Who'll Hold My Big Toe Until I Have to Go" are just tremendous.

Plus, I like the marimba.

― J, Saturday, April 20, 2002 8:00 PM (7 years ago)

'lick my decals' is most often described as beefheart's best album by people who actually listen to beefheart. but yeah 'trout mask' is usually the one that shows up on the 100 best-of-all-time lists, which is really confusing as it is staggeringly hostile listening. I'm assuming it just gets bonus points for being one of the most single handedly bizarre records to have been released on a major label up to that point in history -- so it left a deeper mark. 'lick my decals' sounded normal in comparison once it came out a year later...

I'd tell anyone to start with 'decals' over 'trout mask'.

― jl, Monday, April 7, 2003 8:22 PM (6 years ago)

I wouldn't. Do you lower yourself slowly into a plunge pool?

i don't know if i really have an explanation for why born to run is my favorite boss album (and my number 1). it just hits me really hard. all those cheesy lines about cars and whatever feel so important and so urgent, and it emotionally moves me more than perhaps any other single album. thunder road is easily one of my favorite songs.

It's only cheesy because loads of people have done it since, but few did it since Chuck Berry till then.

(Not a Bruce fan at all, btw)

31. The Cars - The Cars (1978) [131 points, 13 votes]

http://i45.tinypic.com/2iowb7.jpg

The Cars were very important, if only because they were the first "new wave" band to be embraced by American AOR/classic-rock radio. They were sort of a "gateway drug" for millions AOR/classic- rock fans trapped in the suburbs with nothing but mainstream media for company, not to mention the fact that they subsequently influenced AOR/classic-rock artists themselves. Listen to the mid- '80s recordings of a band like, say, .38 Special. Hear all those clicky, compressed 8th-note rhythm guitar parts? Where do you think a bunch of reconstructed second-string Southern-boogie hair farmers came up with something like that?

― Lee G, Sunday, May 19, 2002 8:00 PM (7 years ago)

"Just What I Needed" has been my least favourite track off the debut since, oh, 1980; but through no fault of The Cars. Rather, blame it on a cover band featuring a friend's older brother on drums. She and I sat in their basement one afternoon for hours and listened to her brother's band attempt "Just What I Needed" 92 times, only to be thwarted every time by the idiot vocalist who apparently had no concept of rhythm, 'cause he'd start singing "...Wasting all my time" a beat too early - EVERY time! Kinda ruined the song for us all, for all time.

― Myonga Von Bontee (Myonga Von Bontee), Monday, November 28, 2005 12:42 PM (4 years ago)

there are moments when i think that the cars are one of the more unjustly neglected new wave acts out there. if anything, i think that they're due for a re-evaluation by the corny indie fuXors community any day now.

― Eisbär (llamasfur), Monday, November 15, 2004 1:23 AM (5 years ago)

A-little-embarrassed-but-hell-not-really is the best way to communicate your enthusiasm for music. Those 'Born To Run' comments are fantastic!