madonna: ray of lights vs. smashing pumpkins: adore vs. depeche mode: ultra vs. tori amos: from the choirgirl hotel vs. roland orzabal: tomcats screaming outside vs.

Eh, that first Garbage album went pretty heavy on the electronics before going heavy on the electronics was cool. This thread seems reserved for the bandwagon jumpers.

― Fresh Toast (Old Lunch), Monday, November 13, 2017 5:05 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah that's fair.

Agreed on the mentions Walking Wounded, that's a great album (that I somehow only heard this year).

mentions of

Reznor seemed like he might go in this direction when he released 'Perfect Drug' between albums but he pulled back the reins a bit.

uh... maybe listen to Pretty Hate Machine and The Downward Spiral again? Reznor has been in this zone from the beginning.

it's maybe a bit of a stretch but you could put Wilco's Summer Teeth here

I voted REM bc I'm on (all all things) a 2000s REM kick

17 seconds of compassion
17 seconds of peace
17 seconds to remember love is the energy behind which all is created
17 seconds to remember all that is good
17 seconds to forget all your hurt and pain
17 seconds of faith
17 seconds to trust you again
17 seconds of radiance
17 seconds to send a prayer up
17 seconds is all you really need

17 seconds of faith

"Look, mother! The core. The heart music. The Cure."

"Fuck off, William."

lmao

ray of light (the song) has been an anthem to me and my friends for years. it's totally 'mom rave' but also bangs and is so easy to get lost to; i'll never get tired of dancing to it

the core, the heart music. matchbox 20

underworld is too early and maybe not precisely fitting in the parameters but theirs was the most successful rock-to-electronic(a) reinvention, so successful that their 3rd album is practically considered to be their debut

alternate thread title was going to be "albums that definitely did or should've inspired an underworld remix"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUsb_mvzxX4

this is ofc one of my favorite tracks ever

Love the concept of this thread. ultra works for me because it was my first DM album (I was too young for anything earlier) and I got into it I think precisely because it was chiming with everything else I was into.

Other possible partial inclusions:

Kylie Minogue - Impossible Princess (same caveats as Madonna but this was for the most part her first and last “very serious electronica” album)

Curve - Come Clean (obv the same caveats as Garbage)

Yeah, this seems custom made for Radiohead. I loved The Bends, but when they decided to rip off electronic artists and then got praised for it, instead of called out as trendhopping opportunists, I bailed.

ah you’re one of those

lmao

regardless of their fitness I think we have enough places on ilm to talk about radiohead as it is

kid a feels too tasteful for this thread, ok computer too “actually a rock record,” but i get it

I am primarily an electronic music lover, and having Radiohead be praised when they just stole sounds and ideas from electronic artists and labels, was really frustrating. So yeah, I'm one of those people who resent bandwagon hoppers.

As another electronic music lover, my reaction to that argument/opinion is "lol"

It is ridiculous, but there ya go. I am aware of the issues of my complaints about Radiohead.

voted Ray of Light because it's one of the best albums ever but another great poll option imo would be Think Tank

Madonna feels out of place here, because she'd been doing contemporary dance music right from the beginning of her career, so I don't see how doing contemporary dance music in 1998 was any kind of deviation for her?

also feel like Various Positions is proto... this

i guess you could flatten madonna’s career in that way sure

Ray of Light is informed by contemporary dance music, and you can dance to it, but it's got an ethereal, spiritual vibe I don't associate with her earlier work, lot's of "World" influences too, and Music is full on electronica iirc

Daysleeper is a great REM single, wish the other singles were more like that

Maybe Sade's Lovers Rock fits

i guess ok computer and kid a (more so) fit conceptually, but less so in terms of the 'electronica' vibe most of these share

From The Choirgirl Hotel

Liquid Diamonds and Hotel just destroy

also FTCGH is a transitional album in Tori's discography. The arrangements flirted with electronics in a way that would be explored even further on TVAB and Scarlet's Walk.

Voted Passengers because it has some pretty pure Eno soundtrack moments on there, esp. “One Minute Warning” which is a blast

might go with Gran Turismo by the Cardigans as 'other', if that counts (1998 again)

fuck that one TOTALLY counts

also FTCGH is a transitional album in Tori's discography. The arrangements flirted with electronics in a way that would be explored even further on TVAB and Scarlet's Walk.

― Week of Wonders (Ross), Monday, November 13, 2017 5:02 PM (thirty-six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

scarlet's walk seems a pretty deliberate retreat from electronics? the most artificial she gets is sometimes she plays a rhodes

venus and back, sure

yeah, i was a bit off on that one Brad - maybe would have made more sense to say strange little girls with tracks like "i'm not in love"

up has a lot of great stuff on it, especially the mellow stuff with vibraphone

voted "other" for Walking Wounded.

The Kennedys, Evolver.

Luna, Pup Tent.

Both fit this vibe IMO

I love Up and Walking Wounded.

Garbage v2.0 fits this mold.

Love And Rockets' Hot Trip to Heaven absolutely belongs on this list but I wouldn't necessarily vote for it.

ahhhh "my favorite game" hell yes

re: cardigans

Madonna feels out of place here, because she'd been doing contemporary dance music right from the beginning of her career, so I don't see how doing contemporary dance music in 1998 was any kind of deviation for her?

Most Madonna albums are stylistic deviations from their predecessors in one way or another. But (if I can presumptuously speak on Brad's behalf for a moment) this thread isn't about deviations per se.

It's about rock/pop artists putting out albums mostly during the second half of the nineties where "engagement with electronica" feels like a major talking point for the album, something you'd expect to see raised prominently in reviews and used as a barometer for success (i.e. "how successful was that engagement?"). And in a sense, what the artists were really engaging with was the uncertainty of what it meant to be modern and "alternative" in the late nineties, which you could boil down to appearing on the cover of Spin with slightly oddball make-up and ensuring that your music felt like it could soundtrack that cover photo, especially if it was some kind of edgy genre-bending (apply scare quotes liberally to those words) single off a film soundtrack.

In this context, "electronica" was mostly code for the kind of "dance music" that had found most success away from the dancefloor during the mid-nineties - so, really, house doesn't even count except by accident e.g. both "Ray of Light" and Tori's "Raspberry Swirl" could be considered house-pop, but they sound more inspired by e.g. the upbeat stretches of the first two Bjork albums rather than "house music" per se. And yes, Madonna actually literally made a fake Bjork tune earlier with "Bedtime Story" but that was an outlier on its parent album, which was more about "engagement with R&B".

(lol actually just read the Madonna interview she did with Spin at the time! It explains everything: https://www.spin.com/2016/03/madonna-ray-of-light-cover-story-1998/)

That's also a reason why Ultra feels like it fits: it was the first of two albums where DM turned to producers who had grown up through UK dance music (and had both worked with Bjork, of course) to fill the hole in their line-up. It takes literally seconds for you to think "oh, this album sounds a lot like Clear sonically".

This was definitely an era of lots of artists talking up their own recent additions to their record collections and then wearing those new influences on their album sleeves in a very Primal Scream (whose Vanishing Point also fits this trend in part) way.

the big Canadian one was The Tea Party's Transmission ('97)

Crash Test Dummies - Give Yourself a Hand (99) ?

Also if we're going to include Ray of Light, would Kylie's Impossible Princess also work, or is that one more all over the map?

right yeah all these albums are more or less the artist engaging with "electronica", it's just that with depeche mode and madonna you have two artists that are ALREADY electronic, so the engagement is more specifically directed towards .. um.. not necessarily trip hop but "deep" "home listening" side of electronica.

xp to tim

vanishing point is a good call

xpost - not sure, but even at the time I remember thinking “this era has passed” in October 2000 when both U2 and PJ Harvey released naturalistic “return to rock” albums.