Like news pastiche panel shows and the North Korean leadership, the top end of Best Albums Ever lists is a bit of a closed shop. Once critical consensus gathers around an album, they become self-perpetuating classics, the albums every budding critic and serious music fan needs to hear and revere.
Of course, that leaves vast swathes of our favourite records that were somehow passed over, unfairly dismissed or left to languish unjustly in the critical mid-table.
How underrated can an album reasonably be? Well, no one here is going to argue that Robbie Williams’ Swing When You’re Winning should’ve won the Mercury or that The Darkness’s Permission to Land is the cheese rock Abbey Road. But below are our picks for those lesser-lauded albums which deserve a more prominent place in the upper echelons of the critical catalogue.
10. The Corrs, Talk On Corners
After its 1997 release this album was in about one in five households, and its lead single “Only When I Sleep” reached the top 10 globally. However, it never received the artistic acclaim it deserved, as critics dismissed its Celtic-rock influences and “goofy” production.
Songs like “Only When I Sleep” are replete with lush harmonies and plenty of nods to the siblings’ Irish heritage. “I Never Loved You Anyway”, opening on a jubilant flurry of the violin, is wonderful in its catharsis, not least on the big kiss-off chorus. The Corrs have always been cool, and don’t let the haters tell you otherwise. ROC
9. Kirsty MacColl, Kite
Almost 25 years after her death, it’s high time that our collective memory of Kirsty MacColl graduated from bawdy festive Pogues sidekick to one of British pop’s most sublime and individual voices. Key to that transition is the dusting down of her high-point Kite, previewed weekly on the French and Saunders TV show back when musical interludes were a thing and released to polite acclaim in 1989.
The record is a magnificent showcase of MacColl’s craft. Her angelic multi-tracked vocals – light and forthright, but laced with melancholy – drift across diaphanous indie rock songs (“Innocence”, “What Do Pretty Girls Do?”), country laments (“Don’t Come the Cowboy With Me Sonny Jim!”) and biting flamenco tunes about fatal fame (“Fifteen Minutes”). Or – trigger warning: your hardest heartbreak ever – over “You and Me Baby”, where both Johnny Marr and Dave Gilmour help her conjure pop’s most stoic tearjerker. MB
Handout photo of Charli XCX album Crash. See PA Feature SHOWBIZ Music Reviews. Picture credit should read: Polydor. WARNING: This picture must only be used to accompany PA Feature SHOWBIZ Music Reviews
8. Charli XCX, Crash
After a long Brat summer, Charli XCX’s earlier album Crash has all but faded into the background. But as much as critics (and fans) tend to compare it unfavourably to the experimental alt-pop of her neon-green masterpiece, Crash proved her innate understanding of what makes a brilliant pop record. Inspired in part by David Cronenberg’s 1996 erotic thriller of the same name, it featured many of the same collaborators with whom she later joined forces on Brat.
It takes its musical cues from 80s vixens and plays with the artist’s fascination surrounding pop as product. The pulsating club bop “Used to Know Me” interpolates the 1990 Robin S track “Show Me Love”, while “Good Ones” deploys a crunchy Eighties analogue synth beat. ROC
7. The Magnetic Fields, 50 Song Memoir
New York’s experimental pop figureheads regularly get major dues for 1999’s three-volume masterpiece 69 Love Songs. But in 2017, a sister-piece slipped by: a 50-song collection, each representing one year of Merritt’s life at that point, every bit as varied, emotional and melody-packed as his more celebrated earlier opus.
An epic aural autobiography, it captures childhood idealism (“’71 I Think I’ll Make Another World”), 1980s teenage electro thrills (“’83 Foxx and I”), twentysomething poverty and breakdown (“’94 Haven’t Got a Penny”) and the machinations of maturity (“’14 I Wish I Had Pictures”) in an unbounded array of refined songcraft and illuminating detail. MB
6. Frank Black, Frank Black
Having recently split up indie rock’s best band, Frank Black – the freshly adopted moniker of former Pixies singer Black Francis – received a reasonably warm on the release of his self-titled solo debut. Thirty years on, though, for all its cleaner edges and Beach Boys homages, Frank Black clearly ranks alongside Pixies’ masterful Nineties albums in terms of inventive melodies given a malevolent sci-fi gleam.
“Los Angeles” mastered the shape-shifting crank pop form he’d pioneered on “The Sad Punk” and “The Happening”, and few albums have as immaculate a closing tryptic as “Adda Lee”, “Every Time I Go Around Here” and “Don’t Ya Rile ‘Em’. MB
5. Slint, Spiderland
While I’m dubious about Slint’s second and final album’s status as “underrated”, you could claim that fans of post-rock bands underestimate just how influential Spiderland has been since its release in 1991.
Recorded over a period of just four days, the album sold poorly at the time and was met with a rather disinterested reception from critics. In the years since, artists and fans have fallen for its quiet-loud approach that seemed to strip rock back to the very instinct that drives it, a kind of skulking, prehistoric sound. “I don’t think you guys will ever get big, but you’ll be really influential,” guitarist David Pajo recalled Steve Albini telling him in a Guardian interview. He wasn’t wrong. ROC
4. Peter Gabriel, Peter Gabriel 3
Most contemporary critics struggled to reconcile Peter Gabriel’s evolution from the flower head in Genesis to a pioneer of electronic art rock and global music in just five years. His third self-titled album, marked by a melting face on the cover, signified a transformative experimental work that deserves as much respect as Bowie’s Berlin period.
Opening with the stalking violence of housebreaker’s anthem “Intruder” (the first song ever to feature the ubiquitous Eighties gated drum sound made famous on Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight”), the record dubbed “Melt” is an itchy-for-its-meds dissection of madness, war, torture and assassination as unnerving as it is infectious.
“No Self Control” and “I Don’t Remember” are post-punk from a padded room: Gabriel jittering and jabbering through choruses of manic pop brilliance, their catchy synth and guitar riffs played (from the sound of it) with bleeding fingernails. MB
Britney Spears
3. Britney Spears, Blackout
Few music moments are as thrilling as Spears’s opening salvo on her defiant 2007 album, Blackout, which turned a series of personal (and highly publicised) issues into one of her greatest works. The beats are dark and edgy, speaking to the muddied, hedonistic and gossip-ridden times. The icy beats and glitchy synths featured in the album would inspire generations of future-leaning pop stars in the decades to come. Bravo. ROC
2. Swamp Dogg, Rat On!
The artist born Jerry Williams Jr has spent the better part of seven decades being, well, an underdog. A cult figure, he’s managed to be prolific while also magnificently overlooked by much of the mainstream music press.
He credited this album with getting him kicked off his record label due to the controversial cover. The album itself was largely ignored, which is a crying shame. “Do You Believe” is an uplifting plea for equality, while “God Bless America For What” is one of the greatest protest anthems of the 20th century. ROC
The Wedding Present
1. The Wedding Present – Seamonsters
In the 90s Leeds’ Wedding Present emerged as the most ferocious and angst-ridden janglers of the C86 scene, but evolved a grimier sound on 1989’s Bizarro. With Steve Albini as murky midwife, they then birthed a darkly momentous third album in Seamonsters.
Nihilism, desolation and raging anguish engulf David Gedge’s infectious romantic tragedies on “Suck”, “Heather” and “Dalliance”, the flesh-tearing lament of the third wheel in infidelity’s eternal triumvirate. Dense and demented – yet capable of moments of sheer headrush euphoria on “Corduroy” or “Dare”. MB