Albums that were great when they came out but sound dated now

(actually, i know where yr coming from julio...it's the same argument we had on the thread about my snotty blog entry about "newness"...and i'll still don't agree with you, but i know where yr coming from.)

dead on, re. ill, however.

Does dated=bad?

yeah, goldie. it's aged terribly in a way that, say, new forms hasn't (or esp. not black secret tech or parallel universe<>/i>), basically for the same reason that all prog does: the sheer ambition of the fucking thing makes you sit up and say WOW, only to realize a few years later that it's mostly just silly and overwrought and ambitious in the way of a college orchestra attempting to play harry partch. (a fact he felt the need to hammer home with "mother.") i mean, it should have been fairly obvious at the time ("i record my tracks in 4d"...yeah, well what about the tunes you fucker!), but i suspect this would have made it onto many best albums of the decade polls if polled even as late as 97 or 98.

i think that, perhaps by virtue of it sounding 'dated' since the day it was released, debut has actually held up rather well

i still love the fucked up manic cyber-dub nightmare rush of 'This Is A Baad' - its also a brilliant example of the great way Goldie and Playford liked to flip the mood of their tracks...dirty basslines and fx and domineering metallic filtered breaks...suddenly a glorious sweeping pad breaks thru the dark smoke like the most intense sunshine followed by a classic but so very faint house piano lick...happier memories and tiny reminders trying to penetrate the threatening confusion and paranoia of the whirling prison the dancefloor seems to have become for these 4 minutes....mahahaha

What about the other side of the argument -- albums that can you can't really picture sounding dated? Since I Left You, f'rinstance.

good point. i can still pull my copy out and enjoy it, but there is something exploratory and unrefined about the whole album. i think those qualities are what gives it personality. if that was your point, then, by-golly, i agree.

Listen to it. It still sounds great. Who cares if he's a twat.

Whereas New Forms... couple of good tunes, lots of mediocrity.

So how did you change your mind? Did ILM convince you to approach it from a different angle, or is it just a case of giving it another chance, repeated listenings etc?

btw I agree mostly about Timeless but the beats in the title track are classic and the John Woo 'The Killer' sample is cool.

"The Modern Age" is basically a cover of Tall Dwarfs' "Crush" which is from 1984. So this is very true by definition.

Wrong.

What Jess doesn't mention about Cupid and Psyche is that it has some beautiful songs on too - "A Little Knowledge"! I think License To Ill still sounds great too though.

Loved 'em to bits at the time, just don;t seem to want to play 'em any more.

Me too! BUT it's not half as good as Provision.

this is bullshit of course. the best of that bunch easily holds up.

Dated = clearly of a time (and maybe diminished because of this)

eg. "Don't You Want Me"

"Golden Brown" - Stranglers

But Nirvana records? To say those have dated is a totally off-the-mark assertion. Bleach sounded dated the second it was released; perhaps that was the point. The other two stand as all-time greats, among rock's finest works. The bullshit that's been on the radio ever since shows just how great a songwriter Cobain really was ... and how the power of great drum sounds never dies.

Besides, if you say Nevermind is dated, then that assumes Who's Next is dated, which is to say: Who fucking cares if the albums are truly that great?

What exactly does that mean?

Just saying it sounds like a one-off, minimal-take recording session that cost only $600. A moment in time.

(I think that more than anything, reliance on new technology instead of songwriting is what leaves thigns feeling dated, and that's the mark on a lot of techno/electronic music...)

TS: Dated vs. Retro?

Most of Madonna's early stuff (True Blue) sounds especially dated. There's something very thin-sounding about them - both in her pre-training voice and those horrible tinny synths.

Kate Bush's Hounds Of Love also sounds quite dated in places, possibly because it was so cutting-edge at the time. The songwriting is fucking amazing, but the drum machine programming occasionally sounds comic.

The same goes for Aerial. Wonderful songwriting, but again dated drum programming and flamenco guitar (hello? Didn't Where Do You Go? kill that sound off for at least a decade).

As for what WILL date, Gwen Stefani's L.A.M.B. will age horribly (botox to hold up ageing records not yet being invented).

I'd disagree strongly with the argument Debut is a 'dated' album though. I listened to it a short while ago for the first time after a long gap and it's amazing how fresh it still sounds now. Venus As A Boy has, especially, hardened into a bona fide classic. If any of her albums is going to age gracelessly it'll be Post.

I think the answer to this question is going to be "anything older than ~10 years, going back till you were a teenager." I note relatively few entries from the very recent past on this thread, with I think Wilco and the Lips being the only ones to get put in that box maybe? Oh, and the Modest Mouse thing which I am confused and intrigued about, would like to hear that elaborated on. I've maybe gotten a bit tired of TM&A, and I've moved on, but I don't think it dates itself.

I find myself not listening to Nirvana much either, but not because they weren't great, just because I invested so much mental energy into that band for such a long time, I need a prolonged break.

fresh - dated - fresh again - dated again - fresh all over again - dated all over again

And there's potentially no end to it, except "forgotten". And even that can end with "revived!" (Like this thread.)

I'm increasingly finding that Weezer's first two albums-- which I loved when they came out-- are annoying to listen to. I can still only listen to a couple songs on each album without feeling sick. "No One Else" and "In the Garage" in particular are still good. Most of everything else, just sounds a bit childish or something. Of course, I'd rather listen to those albums over anything that followed those two albums any day of the week.

Destroyer, ugh--hard to believe I liked it so much, now it turns my stomach

Chicago XIII

...And Justice For All

"nevermind the bollocks"
and just about every other canonical punk LP except for the ramones' LPs.

Thankfully, I never understood the hoopla about Destroyer

Golden Palomino's This Is How It Feels. Loved the shit out of it for years after it came out -- could care less about it now.

Moby :(

Destroyer, ugh--hard to believe I liked it so much, now it turns my stomach

― iago g., Monday, November 3, 2008 3:45 AM (1 hour ago)
but "no cease fires" is still his best song!

Moby :(

Absolutely OTM.

New Forms- Roni Size/Reprazent (1st version, haven't listened to the remake)
Untrue- Burial
Ys- Joanna Newsom

among others

i think i managed to wear out ys before it was officially released even. is it that it's dated or that we (read--I) listened to it too gd much.

same with last year's burial album, is it dated or are you just burnt out?

Ys- Joanna Newsom

A lot of stuff basically founded on early digital synths and sampling:
Frankie Goes To Hollywood: Welcome To The Pleasure Dome
Art of Noise: Who's Afraid Of
Janet Jackson: Control
Grace Jones: Slave To The Rhythm

Again band doesn't neccessarily mean bad, as these sound dated mainly because they used a kind of technology that was very fresh then, as used for a few years and then largely ditched in favour of using or emulating the old analog technology again.

Those have gone thru sounding "dated" and now they sound fresh again tho.

Late 80s synths will never sound fresh again. They have lost to old analog synths sounds forever. LCD Soundsystem have sounded dated from the first day they appeared on the scene and will always do as long as they insist on using those "harsh" digital sounds.

all of them?

Merits or demerits of LCDS aside, that deliberate retro schtick is permanently modern-sounding, ironically enough.

Cyndi Lauper's "She's So Unusual", the synths on that are so harsh.

The one Cyndi Lauper album that sounds dated with way too much digital synths is "True Colors".

"Sgt. Pepper" is and remains a fantastic album. It does sound dated now though, mainly because of musical trends and fashions moving in the wrong directions from punk onwards.

I was recently listening to a Luther Vandross comp, and all that '80s and '90s electric piano wind chime MOR crappola sounds dead on arrival today. Oh wait, it did then, too.

i'm much too young to have been around when it came out, but parts of She's So Unusual don't really work the way they might have 700 blogyears ago when it was released. though "time after time" is still perfect.

Also: of course, Goldie's ironically titled "Timeless".

psychgawsple, that may be the case (Untrue particularly).

the track "Timeless" still cuts pretty deep tho...(so does "Angel", come to think...the seagull one = bah!)

"Timeless" still sounds great. Partly because there was never anything else that sounded quite like it.

Maxinquaye pwns this thread.

"pwns" is dated :P

pretty hate machine r.i.p.

there seems to be something more than just production or even the instruments used on a record that make it sound 'dated'. as momus (!) hinted at before, this stuff is all cyclical, so it's interesting to consider what makes certain eras so appalled at the sounds of another.

seems that, in my opinion at least, pretty much any influential album from the late '90s sounds super dated at the moment. even records i know by heart like 'in the aeroplane over the sea' or 'endtroducing', in large part because enough time has passed for other artists to come along and dilute the hell out of the ideas on those records. in a few years they'll probably sound fresh again, or at least i'll be able to separate the original album from its legacy (hopefully).

but seriously, what albums from the time period 1996-2002 DON'T sound dated right now? anyone else agree?

bucking the trend- belle & sebastian, the avalanches, boredoms, yo la tengo