Why is The Lightning Seeds’ Dizzy Heights on my best 1,000 albums ever list?
Effervescent Britpop from the mid-‘90s with hooks to match.
Some stats & info about The Lightning Seeds – Dizzy Heights
- What kind of musical stylings does this album represent? Britpop, Alternative Pop, Rock, Indie Pop, Pop Music
- Rolling Stone’s greatest 500 albums ranking – not ranked!
- All Music’s rating – 4 out of 5 stars
- When was Dizzy Heights released? 1996
- My ranking, the one you’re reading right now – #960 out of 1,000
The Lightning Seeds’ Dizzy Heights on Spotify
What does the “best 1,000 albums ever” mean and why are you doing this?
Yeah, I know it’s audacious, a little crazy (okay, maybe a lot cray cray), bordering on criminal nerdery.
But here’s what it’s NOT: a definitive list of the Greatest Albums of All-Time. This is 100% my own personal super biased, incredibly subjective take on what my top 1,000 albums are, ranked in painstaking order over the course of doing research for nearly a year, Rob from High Fidelity style. Find out more about why I embarked on a best 1,000 albums ever project.
What does The Lightning Seeds’ Dizzy Heights mean to me? What does it make me feel? Why is it exciting or compelling?
Sometimes bubblegum pop is perfectly delightful, and particularly so for me when it’s Britpop with a delightfully effervescent vibe and hooks and songwriting to match. Take “Sugar Coated Iceberg,” for example, a song so sweet and poppy that it can’t help but put you in a good mood. Not everything has to be dark and edgy and aggressive or moody and melancholy and introspective, right?
A cover of The Turtles’ “You Showed Me” might be my favorite song on the album. It’s less of a revision of the original than a crazy ear pleasing enhancement, with spacy-ier vocals and orchestral backing that all works really well.
Pretty great mid-‘90s music video too, that’s both minimalist and interesting at the same time, which is always hard to pull off.
“Touch and Go” is also really fun and like much of the album has a sun shiny optimistic feel.
This album also sounds like
The Pet Shop Boys but more upbeat is probably the closest comparison.
Pop culture stuff that’s somehow related to The Lightning Seeds’ Dizzy Heights
I lived and worked in England in the late 1990s and got into a bunch of bands that never really caught on back in the states. Bennet is a great example, which isn’t even available on Spotify, sadly (their album, Supernatural, absolutely should be). Bennet actually has some musical similarities to The Lightning Seeds, though they’re far more caustic and sarcastic lyrically.
Thankfully, I was able to dig up a really fun song of theirs called “Mums Gone to Iceland,” which I played a bunch on the old compact disc player back in the UK day.
Also, fun fact that the street depicted in this video could easily have been the one that I lived in with two old and great friends of mine (Adam and Nirav) in Rochester, Kent by the look of it.