Board 8 > Rank the Albums 6 - Albums and Information

(+) Yeah! (+)

25 weeks and 25 track ranked albums later, we've arrived at the 6th edition of Rank the Albums!

As ever, huge thanks to FoolFantastic for running the weekly track ranking for these albums, without which this would not be possible. If you'd like to participate in the ongoing Rank the Tracks, the latest is here, https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/8-gamefaqs-contests/80687614, or search the board for the newest topic.

The 25 albums, in the order we covered them in Rank the Tracks:
Desired - Lovestory
Bruce Springsteen - Born in the U.S.A.
Mr. Bungle - Disco Volante
Madonna - Like a Prayer
Muse - Black Holes & Revelations
Franz Ferdinand - Franz Ferdinand
Rusted Root - When I Woke
The Cure - Disintegration
Sufjan Stevens - Illinois
Jessie Ware - That! Feels Good!
Sade - Love Deluxe
FKA twigs - Magdalene
Arcade Fire - The Suburbs
The Cars - The Cars
Milton Nascimento and Lo Borges - Clube da Esquina
Run-D.M.C. - Raising Hell
Simple Plan - Get Your Heart On!
Crash Kings - Crash Kings
Weird Al Yankovic - Off the Deep End
R.E.M. - Automatic for the People
Vince Guaraldi - A Charlie Brown Christmas
Adele - 21
Meshell Ndegeocello - Peace Beyond Passion
Smashing Pumpkins - Siamese Dream
Nekomata Master - Follow Slowly

To make your life slightly easier, I've created a Spotify playlist with almost all of the albums:
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4ZCzp3ASFsBJY87JExjSMC?si=f9f99c3bdda84f4f

The one missing album, Nekomata Master - Follow Slowly, is only available on Youtube, which can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZBn2WNSFi2wOQFFvZkqYvnCFhyy5rD1w

Your mission, should you choose to accept, is to send me a PM with your ranked list of these albums by end of the day on Sunday, March 10th. Ideally it contains all 25, but you must include at least 15 to qualify. Including short write ups on the albums is encouraged or you could wait until the ranking topic to share your thoughts.

In addition, since people seemed to like it, I'm bringing back Songs of the Cycle! Also via PM, you can optionally send me an unranked list of up to your favorite 25 songs from these albums. There's no restrictions on number of songs per album or anything like that.

Thanks for running this again! I still haven't heard the Charlie Brown Christmas album, will be a bit odd to listen to it in mid-Feb. Hoping I'll be able to listen to all these by the end of the month.

Tag. I've got a preliminary list, but I'll try to go through each album one more time before deadline since I've got time & my opinions tend to fluctuate.

Bump

I 100% promise this isn't a jab at Fool or Sean, but I feel like this might be the weakest set of 25 so far? Like there are a few albums I really dig (my own nomination included in that obviously) but normally every set of 25 has a handful that I'm super into or really open my eyes to something exciting.

Just means we need some collective game-upping in R7 imo

Also, super appreciate the full playlist! I've been considering trying to put one together with just the top 1 or 2 songs of EVERY album we've done so far

I think this is an interesting selection. There's less albums I just straight up didn't care about than in R5 and the bottom ten is a little better, but I think my top fifteen are far weaker overall in comparison. Plastic Beach and The Black Parade were two of my favourite albums full stop, and it's hard to compete with that, even having a nomination of my own. Even the albums I didn't love, I'm glad I got to listen to.

One more relisten of an album I just can't place, the Charlie Brown album and I think I might be done. A lot of albums were far enough apart in opinion on first ratings that they were simple to position. Last ranking I had huge difficulty with all of the 10-20 range (I think having more than six weeks to listen to them all has also done me a lot of favours).

I feel like this set is fairly comparable in overall quality to the previous one, though I think I prefer this one by a bit. There aren't any albums that I outright dislike here (compared to one last time), and there are more albums that I feel strongly about (probably about 8 of them).

Johnbobb posted...

I 100% promise this isn't a jab at Fool or Sean, but I feel like this might be the weakest set of 25 so far? Like there are a few albums I really dig (my own nomination included in that obviously) but normally every set of 25 has a handful that I'm super into or really open my eyes to something exciting.

Just means we need some collective game-upping in R7 imo

I add to my ranking as we go along each week, and based on that, my initial numbers tend to agree with your assessment. Most of the top of my list is stuff I'd heard before, with one notable exception which I effusively praised during it's Rank the Tracks week.

My feeling is that we're continuing to get more obscure over time. The initial 10-20-30 weeks of Rank the Tracks was full of well known (and usually, by proxy, well regarded) albums. We still do hit those "classics" occasionally but more often than not the nominations each week are a complete unknown to me. I know Fool's idea with the competitive weeks was that people would put up more "classic" albums to try to win. But in practice...I don't think that's really been the case?

Johnbobb posted...

Also, super appreciate the full playlist! I've been considering trying to put one together with just the top 1 or 2 songs of EVERY album we've done so far

No problem! I did one last cycle, just for myself, to make my re-listens easier. Figured this time I'd share! Come the results topic, I will hopefully have found the time to make playlists for all the previous cycles.

I know Fool did make a list of the #1s earlier on but I don't think it's up to date. It's more work than people realize trying to make topics, track results, and do all the little miscellaneous things. And to then continue to do that every single week!

Sheep007 posted...

I think this is an interesting selection. There's less albums I just straight up didn't care about than in R5 and the bottom ten is a little better, but I think my top fifteen are far weaker overall in comparison. Plastic Beach and The Black Parade were two of my favourite albums full stop, and it's hard to compete with that, even having a nomination of my own. Even the albums I didn't love, I'm glad I got to listen to.

One more relisten of an album I just can't place, the Charlie Brown album and I think I might be done. A lot of albums were far enough apart in opinion on first ratings that they were simple to position. Last ranking I had huge difficulty with all of the 10-20 range (I think having more than six weeks to listen to them all has also done me a lot of favours).

Continuing on from my comment above, but having not done my re-listens yet, this cycle felt very segmented for me. There's something like 9 good/great albums, 11 fine/okay, and 5 I'll likely never listen to again after this.

Like you, my initial listening opinions this cycle felt much less muddied than the last few cycles. Last time, I had a few albums that moved multiple positions on a re-listen; I'm not expecting that this time.

I might try to jump in on this. Always been curious but never have bit the bullet

The competitive weeks have been weird because I feel like the people choosing more notable works all faced each other.

Anyway, 6 of these 25 albums are in my all-time top 100 and I have a few other favorites. It definitely feels like our weirdest batch, and probably our least 'rock.'

Had a few shifts on relistens, there's multiple albums where I don't love the individual tracks but I appreciate them more, now that I'm thinking holistically. I feel a bit more fond of the group of albums altogether. I'm also heavily regretting not listening to Charlie Brown Christmas at the time. How do you judge a Christmas album without the context of the season? I'll submit my rankings once I solve that particular conundrum.

Still working on relistens (think I'm 14 albums in), but I think this set has the highest average quality. Like, I don't think I'd put anything in the top 5 albums we've covered, but there's also nothing that I strongly dislike. Even my bottom two albums from this cycle would have likely been in the top half of any past cycle.

And I've finally started my re-listens.

Much like I do with the track rankings, my final listen is in the preliminary ranking order. My #1 is gonna stay my #1, but I'm thinking about flipping my #2 and #3 around. A bit surprising to me but listening to them back to back kind of makes it more obvious which one I enjoyed slightly more.

Alright, I've got mine submitted. In retrospect, I really should have gone over my writeups & fixed the many, many typos... but let's just pretend there's some value in pure, unedited stream of consciousness thoughts regardless of how garbled they are.

@Seanchan

Actually, would you mind if I scrapped that list and submitted a new one tomorrow? I want to move an album up one or two spots, correct some typos, and switch my top songs around a bit... think I'd like to give myself a hard "no more than three songs per album" rule to free up space for a few other songs. Had four songs stuck in my head the past two days, feels like they need to be on my list.

Fluttershy_Pony posted...

@Seanchan

Actually, would you mind if I scrapped that list and submitted a new one tomorrow? I want to move an album up one or two spots, correct some typos, and switch my top songs around a bit... think I'd like to give myself a hard "no more than three songs per album" rule to free up space for a few other songs. Had four songs stuck in my head the past two days, feels like they need to be on my list.

No problem! Plenty of time still to make adjustments.

Just been going through set 1, lots of classics in there (and a very rock-focused track list compared to what we're getting these days). I've listened to a lot of them before, but good kid, m. A. A. D. city is amazing and I'm glad to have beene exposed to it. Also equally glad I didn't ever feel obligated to listen to Hamilton in full, because I couldn't stand it.

Oh, if you're interested in the previous cycles, here's the "in the order we covered" playlists:
1 - https://open.spotify.com/playlist/21a09jRvOa9sMRfXAqo2Iz?si=748a7317228c438b
2 - https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6gawmnB6QifXsMVbVZa99W?si=be721b0e7e6f4eb0
3 - https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7cPyaIGGquGFcdSDP6IjTo?si=3dc5c10b393b4230
4 - https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3H7Ki0AXXaqlOVN0WdAlod?si=f4d320c055a147eb
5 - https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6nKKEvPSyMDejhluC7OZQ8?si=8a25d6c66aeb4a5b

Perhaps at some point I'll get around to doing other playlists in the order of the results of the group rankings.

The older cycles (maybe just the first 2?) had a different nomination process. You submitted albums and then anyone could support them. Only albums that got supported by 5+ people were covered. Doing it that way naturally favors more mainstream/popular stuff that can get broad support.

Thanks for the playlists! Will make going through them a lil easier.

Seanchan posted...

No problem! Plenty of time still to make adjustments.

Thanks! Sorry for the trouble, but I just sent the revised list and am officially done for real this time.

Two weeks left!

I'm about halfway through my re-listens now.

bump

1 week remaining!

Still got 8 albums to go through, but I should get it done by the deadline.

sent

Bump

Got my preliminary bottom 5 to still listen to, so...not looking forward to that...

If anyone wants to participate and needs a little extra time, please let me know. Life circumstances may end up necessitating me pushing this back anyways.

Me: "March 10th?! That's a really short amount of time."

Me after scrolling down and seeing the second post came from 4 weeks ago: "Oh, that makes sense."

Final weekend!

That said, if you're thinking of participating and need a bit more time, please let me know!

Still got one relisten to do, should have it in this evening!

Finished my last relisten. Will need a bit of time to finalize my ranking and my list of 25 songs, but I'll get my submission in by the end of the day tomorrow (Sunday).

Okay, I've got lists so far from myself, Fluttershy_Pony, Johnbobb, FoolFantastic, and Sheep007.

Just sent mine.

Yup, I got lists from MaxGalactica and HBJDubs, which takes us to 7! That's about how many I was expecting.

I should be putting up the results topic later this evening.