Albums you grudgingly respect / dutifully acknowledge the objective eminence, but when push comes to shove you never actually want to play / could happily never hear again.
Velvet Underground - White Light, White Heat
The Beatles - The Beatles aka White Album
The Band - Music From Big Pink
David Bowie - The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars
David Bowie - Station to Station
David Bowie - "Heroes"
Can - Ege Bamyasi
Rolling Stones - Exile on Main Street
The Aphex Twin ...I Care Because You Do
"Bypasses You Almost Completely" - the "almost" here refers to the one or two tracks on the album you unreservedly love. Usually these are The Obvious Singles e.g. "'Heroes'", "The Weight" - even when it isn't literally a single (was "Vitamin C" a single? Perhaps it was in Germany). Sometimes there's like one other track you really like e.g. "The Secret Life of Arabia".
With Ziggy, it's just "Ziggy Stardust" and "Suffragette City".
With Station, it's just "Golden Years", which is one of my absolute favorites by Bowie. The title track's eminence in people's hearts continues to perplex.
White Album, the actively liked songs would be "Blackbird" and "Something", "Back in the U.S.S.R"... A few others are nice enough ("Guitar Weeps", "Mother Nature's", "Dear Prudence", “Warm Guitar”) Its grade is lowered by the excrescent presence of some of the very worst things they ever made: "Glass Onion", "Ob-La-Di", "Bungalow Bill", "Do It In the Road". Most anything perpetrated by McCartney. Mainly, it's just very very long.
Exile is just a samey slog really. "Happy" and "Let It Loose" would be my picks here.
Apart from the sublime "Alberto Balsam" nothing from .... I Care Because You Do has ever managed to lodge itself in the memory or the heart, despite periodic attempts at "giving it another go"
^^^^
Albums that don’t qualify for this category -
- universally accepted as duff /disappointing records by Canonic artists (eg Television’s Adventure)
- albums by Canonic artists where there is no consensus about whether it’s great or shite (Strangeways Here We Come).
(I am not sure what Smiths fans feel about Meat Is Murder - to me is it is a mystifyingly slight and sterile sounding album redeemed by two luminously wondrous songs, “Well I Wonder” and “the Headmaster Ritual” and if I am feeling generous “That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore” which is lushly appointed (it is lowered in my estimation by being a bizarrely misguided choice as a single - continuing a long stretch in which the Smiths could do (almost) no right when it came to the Single (from Shakespeare’s Shitstir to well the end really - save perhaps Thorn, Shoplifters, Sheila). Meat also contains some of their slightest tunes - "Rusholme", "Want The One I Can't Have", "Nowhere Fast", "Barbarism Begins" - and a couple of real graters ("What She Said", "Meat Is Murder" itself). I suppose on balance, added up, it totals out as simply not very good, even before you factor in the clinical production. But I'm sure many would disagree).
