Best Album on OUR Favourite Albums of......1996 PART ONE

Feed Me Weird Things is great, also love Hard Normal Daddy and Music Is Rotted One Note

Head sez Labradford, heart sez Bardo.

Elephant Six is such a great historical artifact, I still love a lot of the music that came out of it

even kind of prefer Black Love to Gentlemen these days

Harvey Milk’s “Courtesy and Good Will Toward Men” without hesitation.

even kind of prefer Black Love to Gentlemen these days

― campreverb, Friday, 9 August 2019 04:00 (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I rate them about the same.

very very highly

New Kingdom! Had that been on either list it might have been a contender...

I like that album actually. I forgot about it

not a great list for me.
better stuff on the bubbling under list.
voted for the album that i still play on a regular basis - LFO
and agree re New Kingdom.

I'll talk Lilys with you evan

A question for North Americans - While the UK 'indie/alternative' music scene was overwhelmed by Britpop by 1996 what were North American 'indie/alternative' fans listening to post 1995?

Black Star Liner - Yemen Cutta Connection

oh damn this takes me back, I loved that album, pretty much wore the tape out. whatever happened to those guys?

obviously an actual American will have a more relevant answer to your question but I joined the Pavement mailing list in the summer of '96 (99% populated by American college kids) and the year-end lists were kind of revelatory, but the stuff I remember being on nearly every list was GBV, JSBX, Afghan Whigs, and a lot of Elephant Six stuff or some nascent post-rockish thing like the Sonora Pine or A Minor Forest

(though re the latter pair I may just be remembering bands whose names I found intriguing as "most talked about", see also how in my memory John Peel played that Swirlies album a lot but that's probably just because it's a striking album title)

Not in any order:

That was the era of trip hop and turntablism - two trends that I intertwine in my mind though they are quite different. DJ Shadow's Endtroducing, Tricky. Labels like Mo Wax and Ninja Tune.

Post-rock was a big thing - Tortoise and all the Chicago acts in its orbit. Labels like Touch & Go, Thrill Jockey, Quarterstick, Drag City. Honestly Millions Now Living and Tortoise in general were a Big Deal to a lot of people I knew, sort of the way Animal Collective was regarded in the 00s. They felt like a significant break with what a lot of indie kids were into prior to that. But in retrospect it doesn't feel like it had a lasting impact, and I feel like people who didn't live through that era have a hard time believing that was the case with that band.

Hip Hop was huge - Snoop, Dre, 2pac, Fugees

I can't really speak to what was huge in the "alternative" mainstream - I sort of blocked it out in those years. Aside from the biggest britpop acts like Oasis, wasn't that the era of American bands like Matchbox 20 and Three Doors Down and all that stuff? Like you had big alternative explosion of the early 90s, followed by the Grunge pretenders like Seven Mary Three and Candlebox, then the bands that took the edge even off of those groups and just became a bland kind of alt-rock.

It was indeed the height of what Eric Weisbard termed "scrunge," but a few years before Matchbox 20 and 3 Doors Down.

the post rock/math rock stuff wasnt really covered a lot here in 96 except for Tortoise and later GYBE/Sigur Ros but it had a small amount of fans and of course then Mogwai introduced it to a lot of people and that mogwai/EITS strain took off a bit. Most coverage tended to be in The Wire as Melody Maker went all indie smash hits late 90s.

Late 90s or early 00s I started buying US music mags from Tower Records or Borders. My favourite was Skyscraper Magazine. Eventually started buying it from the US directly as I was hardly ever in Glasgow and had no idea when it would appear. But that mag was how I found out about a lot of the US bands that weren't covered by the UK indie press.

Are the Spin lists of the time representative or was that more mainstream alt?

http://www.rocklistmusic.co.uk/spinend.htm#96

the Spin lists from the 90s look to me like a good representation of indie/alternative with a little mainstream stuff thrown in

On FB I asked the question and was told Magnet was a better guide but rocklist only had this

http://www.rocklistmusic.co.uk/newsgroup99.htm

ROCK LIST FROM MAGNET - 1998
For lack of a better description, MAGNET is the American equivalent of WIRE.

ARTISTS OF THE YEAR:

1. Neutral Milk Hotel
2. Elliot Smith
3. Belle and Sebastian
4. Ani DiFranco
5. John Spencer Blues Explosion
6. Spoon
7. Massive Attack
8. Brian Jonestown Massacre
9. Air
10. Cat Power

20 ALBUMS THAT MATTERED IN 1998 (in alphabetical order, I assume)

• Archers of Loaf- White Trash Heroes
• Beck- Mutations
• Blonde Redhead - In An Expression of the Inexpressible
• Calexico - The Black Light
• Caustic Resin- The Medicine is All Gone
• Richard Davies - Telegraph
• Dirty Three - Ocean Songs
• Godspeed You Black Emperor! -f#a#
• Jack Drag - Dopebox
• Mercury Rev - Deserter’s Songs
• Roy Montgomery - And Now the Ran Sounds Like Life is Falling Down Through It
• Pernice Brothers - Overcome By Happiness
• Robert Pollard- Waved Out
• Quasi - Featuring "Birds"
• Sonic Youth - A Thousand Leaves
• Spinanes - Arches and Aisles
• Sunny Day Real Estate - How it Feels To Be Something On
• Tortoise - TNT
• Tricky - Angels With Dirty Faces
• Unkle - Psyence Fiction

Shit, how cool is that Swirlies record?

I guess it didn't get a release outside the US and also maybe the kind of thing that 'out of vogue' with much of the UK music press at the time so it went under the radar here.

Taking on MBV with an East coast indie rock sensibility works brilliantly. Not to say that's all it is, there's lots of invention going on.

For lack of a better description, MAGNET is the American equivalent of WIRE.

hmmm

voted mainliner

by that list it looked more like old melody maker

When I went to the US in 1999 I bought a copy of Magnet to read on the train and yeah it was more like Select than The Wire

I remember buying a Big Takeover in Tower Records or Borders in Glasgow only to be disappointed by the fact it was covering a lot of the British music I was trying to get away from reading about as I hated it. Bloody Idlewild especially.

I wanted American indie stuff not covered by the UK press.

CMJ New Music Monthly was the best source for reviews of indie-rock albums in 1996.

dunno that one.

did they do album of year lists? cant find anything on http://www.rocklistmusic.co.uk/

I don’t recall that they did, no.

pity, its a good way to see what artists they covered.

they did have a monthly CD though:
https://www.discogs.com/Various-CMJ-New-Music-Monthly-Volume-40-December-1996/release/1402554

but I don't know how representative that was of the mag, the CDs would occasionally end up in the £1 bin here but I never saw the magazine

I remember the monthly CD and CMJ, I was mostly reading Rolling Stone and Spin back then. But heavily into Matador records in '96.

Maybe I did see it in Tower Records but it was too expensive if it came with a CD

I rarely read magazines that covered mostly indie stuff back in the day like Magnet, and NME, but was really into the whole underground/diy scene. I get most of my music recommendations from forums and friends and sometimes The Wire nowadays.

did you read fanzines?

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

did anyone read fanzines in the 90s/

I read several zines and created one myself and had a blast doing that. Is that what you mean by fanzines? ;0

which ones did you read?
I used to read a manic street preachers fanzine but most of the fanzines I read were football ones.

btw any volunteers to do the 00s?

I think Brad would be a good choice but whoever wants to do it can do it as I dont fancy it as my tastes really dont align with ILM in that period I hate stuff like Avalanches, LCD Soundsystem, The Knife/Fever Ray and Mike doesn't want to do it either.

alright I'm relistening to the Cake album now. suddenly I'm starting to get all the criticism levied at the band

― frogbs, Wednesday, August 7, 2019 11:08 PM (six days ago) bookmarkflaglink

Haha, I still think I'm voting Cake. Their odd song structures and slacker sarcasm always reminded me of an updated Wall of Voodoo.

xp I would volunteer to work on the 00s, but I don't like those bands either, lol

I'd do a poptimist-free 00s.

not a shot at anyone but i'd like for there to be at least some rap listed each year, so

I'd do a poptimist-free 00s.

― pomenitul, Tuesday, August 13, 2019 3:59 PM (three minutes ago)

that might be interesting, im sure id find a lot of new stuff

50 classical records.

2/3 of them will consist of contemporary music.

Let's do this.

Alternately: we can just poll RYM's top 50 for each year, minus the video game soundtracks, maybe.

tbf I could do a poptimist free 00s quite easily but I dunno if I could face another 10 weeks of "you forgot my fave albums"

If anyone thinks they could do a list of a nice mix that includes hip hop, dance music, metal, underground stuff along with everything else then please give it a go!

Completely on board with polling pomenitul's contemporary classical take on the 00s.

I can do it for each year, but it would take a while, not least because there's no exhaustive database to draw upon. I could also limit each poll to 20-30 releases.