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).
Got to say Station to Station is probably my fave Bowie album but the title track does go on a bit. Lodger is the one from his imperial phase that leaves me cold, not many decent tunes, only Boys Keep Swinging up to his highest standard. Subsequently Scary Monsters is great which gives it undeserved credence, it used to be considered part of the "Berlin trilogy" and not early evidence of the well starting to run dry
ReplyDeleteIt would be interesting to see to what extent albums that fall into this category are totally subjective to each listener, or whether there is likely to be any overlap / consensus at all?
ReplyDeleteEG, even your brief list contains three records I could happily listen to on repeat forever (Velvets, Can, Stones), but I do agree with you on ‘..Big Pink’, which has never fully connected with me.
My impression is of it having briefly been hugely influential upon release, but then subsequently being overshadowed for all time by the (more focused, more immediate and generally better) self-titled album which followed shortly thereafter.
Will try to think up some other examples to add to the list… in fact, just talking Can, ‘Future Days’ is probably one one that sits in this category for me personally… I’ve tried with it over the years, but for some reason it’s always remained an “in one ear / out the other” kind of listen.
I think it's a subjective thing by definition - in many of these cases a curious failing on the part of the self, or to do with the contingencies of listening (when in your life, whether you heard other albums by the artists first, encountering it in a busy time of listening when you couldn't give it the lavish due it deserves).
DeleteBut it would be interesting to see if there is any convergence e.g. with the not much liking Music From Big Pink. Sounds sort of wooden and laden and stately to me, whereas the self-titled next one is just a groove all the way through. (I don't really care for any of the subsequent Band albums - in that sense they are bit like my relationship with Van Morrison which is Astral Weeks and Astral Weeks alone).
I like Lodger or at least it's got a few more winners for me - DJ, Boys Keep, Repetition. Scary is a great album, except that there's some rather, er, strained moments on it. But the four singles are top - particularly fond of "Up the Hill Backwards", which is navel-gazing at its most beguiling. Almost like he'd heard Magazine's The Correct Use of Soap and thought I'll out-do that Devoto lad.
DeleteYoung Americans is crap. Very weird production that makes it sound as though you are listening to the band from behind a glass panel.
ReplyDeleteYounger Than Yesterday sounds a bit thin compared to Fifth Dimension and The Notorious Byrd Brothers.
Pet Sounds and Astral Weeks are albums that totally escape me, but I'm unconvinced that either VM or the Beach Boys are all that great generally.