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.

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

Marko yeah I mentioned Impossible Princess upthread as well - the first single suggested otherwise but it's one of only two songs on the album that doesn't fit the brief.

Also not quite the same since it involved collaborations, rather than the artists themselves, but the Spawn Soundtrack from 1997.

And then there was Moby's Animal Rights, which was the exact opposite of this.

can't believe we took this long to get to Vanishing Point, great album

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.

Yeah exactly, there was this kind of irony at work that a lot of these artists were Americans who were then turning to a very British (plus Air and Stereolab from France, I guess - though I think the latter was more a "this is what I am listening to" namedrop rather than a direct stylistic influence on mainstream artists) notion of electronic music with almost no direct US influences at all.

Amusing to see Madonna bitching out R&B in that interview given it was 1998 and she then waited a full decade before finally deciding to work with Timbaland (by which point he'd pretty much lost it).

uh thank y'all for making this the best thread

i think pj harvey is this desire qualifies. Definitely the most she had dipped into electronics at that point, especially on "Joy" and "The Garden".

Noel Gallagher / Chemical Bros - Setting Sun

i seem to remember a lot of garage artists going the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion 'Acme' route too (they brought in Dan the Automator for that one.) Even R.L. Burnside had a turntablist on one LP iirc? and Medeski Martin and Wood had DJ Logic on an album.

there was also some kind of rule in the late 90s that your album had to be btwn 55 and 65 mins long and most of these fit that too

i still kinda like that Charlatans LP ('Wonderland') where Tim Burgess suddenly adopted a Curtis Mayfield falsetto and they got a bit more danceable.

I should qualify my comment regarding US artists turning to European sources of inspiration - obv. the other really big influence was Beck's Odelay - and yeah to the extent that there is a shadow US narrative it'sin the deference paid to The Dust Brothers, Dan The Automator and Sean Lennon and even the enthusiasm which greeted the return of the Beastie Boys on Hello Nasty on its release (though obviously for a variety of reasons that album is not an example of this phenomenon per se).

So maybe Cibo Matto playing live on Buffy is the eye of the storm.

Actually does anyone remember the soundtrack for A Life Less Ordinary (1998)? Beck, Luscious Jackson, Sneaker Pimps, Underworld, The Cardigans, Alabama 3, Faithless and the REM track pre-Up that most pre-figured the turn toward electronica ("Leave").

Forgot the Folk Implosion were on that soundtrack too.

voted Tori, but anything that isn't Smashing Pumpkins is the right vote.

Kid A totally fits, as does Super Furry Animals' Guerrilla

Does Saint Etienne Sound of Water fit here?

Saint Etienne are at least partly rooted in house music and synthpop from day one so they don't really count IMO. I'm not sure if Ultra does either fwiw - at least one record in the original post (Adore) is considerably more rooted in Depeche Mode than it is in either European or American dance music. Unless it's possible to be both originators and bandwagon jumpers at the same time.

Whereas there's virtually no electronic element to REM or Smashing Pumpkins pre-1998 but both are reaching back to something pre-house and techno. In Adore's case that's the gothy end of 80s synthpop (Gary Numan is all over that record), but then again gothy trip-hop was everywhere in 1998 so it sort of fits.

I've come back round to Up after an autumn of listening to Cluster and Harmonia and realising that its synths have far more to do with mid-70s Germany than anything from the 80s or 90s (although that was obvious from 'Hope' I suppose). Certainly more than the glossier and less inter synthy records they made in the 00s.

'Ray of Light' is the only one that really feels fully of its time and it's probably the best record here but also the one that sounds the most dated right now - very little contemporary music sounds that *pristine*.

Gran Turismo is a good call though, that's the one I immediately thought of. Is there a Placebo album that fits here? Feels like there should be.

Not sure if there’s a whole Placebo album that fits but “Pure Morning” and “Taste In Men” were both at least pretending to be on trend.

There’s probably some awful fake rap tune on the third album that i’ve deliberately erased from my memory.