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.

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.

Actually that reminds me: Suede’s ‘Head Music’ is kind of on this tip isn’t it.

Does Saint Etienne Sound of Water fit here?

Was thinking about this - like some of the other artists here they'd dabbled in dance music before but this was the album where they really went for the (as Brimstead put it) 'home listening' side of dance/electronica so I'd say yes personally.

Another one I thought of late last night was Cornershop's When I Was Born for the 7th Time.

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

See I'm not really sure about this - Kid A is a bit too late to qualify (it's really the first of a particular kind of 00s record rather than a late 90s phenomenon), and it lacks the vampiness that unites a lot of these records. The Radiohead song that really, instantly, seems to fit is 'Talk Show Host' and somewhere there's a parallel universe where Radiohead went further down that rabbit hole. Maybe that its placement on the Romeo and Juliet soundtrack but there's also a sense of campness, of dressing up, that you don't usually get with Radiohead.

Guerilla is SFA's most obviously pluralistic record but it's the culmination of something that was building in their music from the very beginning, even on the first album they were into techno and that shows in the way they'd run an acid line through a punk pop track or whatever.

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

Feel like there was also a subset of early 90s indie/shoegaze dudes who reappred with new names making vaguely countryish music with faux-hip hop beats and obviously Odelay is the rosetta stone for those bands, although Delakota is the only one I can think of right now. Is this what Mojave 3 sounded like?

Agreed that Radiohead don't have an album that really fits - the Airbag/How Am I Driving? EP might do at a stretch I guess.

Thread has reminded me of:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3GN9PZG_qM

Matt OTM about “Talk Show Host”. I think the version on the R&J soundtrack was the Nelly Hooper remix but it applies to the original almost as much.

Airbag is probably the best fitting Radiohead track

Cut Here by The Cure, though a little later than most of this, feels related

ultra's inclusion is admittedly more about association and feeling than it fitting the narrative. also i should have called this thread "drowning in time to a desperate beat"

I think of the Cure as having been pretty darn electronic already, but I won't quarrel about it.

I remember discovering both Ultra and GusGus in about April 1997 and thinking "It's No Good" and "Believe" were the most futuristic music I had ever heard. In my defence I was not quite 15.

... Adore's case that's the gothy end of 80s synthpop (Gary Numan is all over that record)

Speaking as someone who has heard every Numan album, I really don't hear Numan's influence on that record at all.

Is this what Mojave 3 sounded like?

― Matt DC, Tuesday, November 14, 2017 4:55 AM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

not at all. it's been a while since i listened but "early 90s indie/shoegaze dudes who reappred with new names making vaguely countryish music with faux-hip hop beats" is accurate I suppose

Feel like there was also a subset of early 90s indie/shoegaze dudes who reappred with new names making vaguely countryish music with faux-hip hop beats and obviously Odelay is the rosetta stone for those bands, although Delakota is the only one I can think of right now.

Scott 4 were one of these bands I think? Though as far as I know they just appeared rather than reappeared.

yep. feel like the Beta Band's "Dog's Got a Bone" was a touchstone for a lot of this stuff too

Better Than Ezra - How Does Your Garden Grow?

hey brad - posted this on another thread but wanted to make sure you saw it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Vx3wCAWJSk

Rickie Lee Jones' 'Ghostyhead' belongs here too. Oddly seems a more natural fit for her than many others who dabbled in this and would have liked to see her do more in this vein.

Rickie Lee Jones' 'Ghostyhead' belongs here too. Oddly seems a more natural fit for her than many others who dabbled in this and would have liked to see her do more in this vein.

― Dan Worsley, Tuesday, November 14, 2017 8:38 AM (nine minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

aw hell yeah i am listening to this record when i get home

Beth Orton's Superpinkymandy seems like this whole scenario in reverse, wherein she began with the "engagement with electronica" approach and then abruptly moved to a folk pop sound.

A distinguishing feature of Ghostyhead for me is that Rickie used the “going electronica” manoeuvre to give full rein to a certain beatnik spontaneity that had been part of her stylistic make up from the beginning. For me the shifts in songwriting and performance are probably more essential to what makes that album fascinating than the album’s laurel canyon trip hop production, though that’s pretty interesting and largely successfully as well.