"Great" albums you really hate

[Stoneage Dinosaurs]

Is Ziggy Stardust the classic Bowie album? Cause that seems a bit patchy to me.

Oh shit no, it's Hunky Dory isn't it? Nah, that's great. Won't have a bad word said against it.

[Serge]

It depends on the reviewer. 'Ziggy' isn't generally held up as his greatest album musically, more because of the effect and influence it had afterwards, which is why it tends to pop up in generic 'best albums ever' lists, usually compiled (or at least written) by people who probably haven't looked into the rest of his work in depth. Of that era, 'Hunky Dory' is definitely the best in my book (though I like 'Ziggy' too, there's not a song on it I dislike.) These days, it seems that 'Low' often gets touted as his best, and again, was a massive influence on the next wave of music, whose fans are of an age that makes it more likely they'll be the ones writing about it in music magazines and online (*waves*). Though when I first started getting into Bowie, "Heroes" was generally seen as the best of the Berlin trilogy.

[Don_Preston]

Of course, those of us in the know are aware the best of the 'Berlin Trilogy' is David Bowie Narrates Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf.

[Serge]

What about 'Little Drummer Boy'?

[Don_Preston]

Fantastic Voyage brings it down a notch.

[Phil_A]

Not 'hate' but when 40-50% of an LP is shite, I'm not sure how it can be called great.

The Queen is Dead knows who I'm talking about.

Have to agree. I'm always really surprised when it gets called The Smiths' best album, it's always felt just a bit thin to me. "Frankly Mr Shankly", "Vicar In A Tutu" and "Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others" are b-side quality songs at best.

I only really like the whimsical psychedelic side of The Floyd(my favourite track is "Cirrus Minor" from the More soundtrack), so basically anything post-Meddle I'm not arsed about. Dark Side Of The Moon is okay, but I think it really suffers from having such a massive reputation built up around it. I first heard it my reaction was "Huh, that's it?" It just did not live up to what I'd imagined in any way, shape or form.

I have a lot of patience and will give almost anything a chance, but "Wish You Were Here" is the most boring album I have ever heard, bar none. All those endless meandering instrumental sections that never go anywhere interesting. There is nothing to justify any of these songs being as long as they are, it's just...wank.

[holyzombiejesus]

Everything by Led Zeppelin. Horrible sweaty cock music.

[SavageHedgehog]

Everything by Led Zeppelin. Horrible sweaty cock music.

Not a fan either. I did hear a song from the third album recently and quite liked it. Then I looked it up on wikipedia and read this:

Page has also said that the negative press given to the third album affected him so much that he did not give press interviews for 18 months after its release, and was also one of the reasons why the band's subsequent untitled album contained no written information on it at all. However, in more recent years, he has commented on the negative press reaction in somewhat more diplomatic terms "[W]ith hindsight, I can see how if somebody got Led Zeppelin III, which was so different from what we'd done before, and they only had a short time to review it on the record player in the office, then they missed the content. They were in a rush and they were looking for the new "Whole Lotta Love" and not actually listening to what was there. It was too fresh for them and they didn't get the plot. So, in retrospect, it doesn't surprise me that the diversity and breadth of what we were doing was overlooked or under-appreciated at the time."

What a gent. I still think the Death Wish II soundtrack is his finest hour.

[greenman]

Everything by Led Zeppelin. Horrible sweaty cock music.

I would be just the reverse, theres lots of hard rock from that era I don't really care much for(Sabbath, Purple, etc) exactly because it isn't sweaty sex music anymore unlike its black influences.

[massive bereavement]

Anything by Radiohead. Sounds to me like music made for people who think they're depressed but aren't really. The sort of thing you'd play if you'd got a paper cut on your index finger that made it difficult to use the laptop/tablet for 45 minutes.

[mobias]

Unkown Pleasures & Closer - I have to hide this as a friend of mine thinks Joy Division are brilliant and I used to bang on how much I liked them to her. I actually do really like Substance where all the songs are bit live sounding but it's the albums everyone credits as being groundbreaking and I think they're irritatingly mixed and Curtis' voice is rythmless and shit.

I'm sort of in danger of agreeing with you. Although I've come to appreciate them more in recent years. Certainly my attitude when I was younger was The Cure were doing a similar thing at the time way better, to my ears anyway.

Its always struck me as odd that by far and away the two best Joy Division songs, Love Will Tear Us Apart and Atmosphere aren't on either of their albums.

[greenman]

I would certainly agree that the material on Substance sounds better produced and I suspect that its actually that compilation rather than the two actual albums that did most to build their rep in the late 80's and 90's.

[Dr Rock]

I always thought a lot of supposed Joy Division fans said they liked them, always wore the t-shirts but I never caught them actually listening to them much. Whereas your Cure fan only listened to the fucking Cure.

[Stoneage Dinosaurs]

Is Ziggy Stardust the classic Bowie album? Cause that seems a bit patchy to me.

Okay, I've just read the thread title properly, and I don't think there's anything in Bowie's catalogue pre mid 80s that qualifies as hate worthy. So please disregard all of that.

[Pepotamo1985]

"Wish You Were Here" is the most boring album I have ever heard, bar none. All those endless meandering instrumental sections that never go anywhere interesting. There is nothing to justify any of these songs being as long as they are, it's just...wank.

Wahey! Exactly my feelings. Welcome To The Machine is just dreary dreadfulness, a really pitiful attempt to create an atmospheric 'experience' rather than a song, that falls almost hilariously flat...and drones on for fucking hours. There's just nothing to like or appreciate about it. It's actively unpleasant to listen to, in the blandest possible way. Same goes for Have A Cigar, which again is almost mind bogglingly uninspiring. Much of Floyd's music fits this vein for me - there's little to nothing actively horrible about it, but it commits the much greater crime of being totally lacking in any emotional impact whatsoever. It's like Special K or unsalted crisps.

It's a privileging perspective to be sure (with lashings of pseuod-psychological speculation thrown in for bad measure), but I daresay that many of Floyd's most ardent supporters are people who haven't been exposed to, or simply can't hack, proper prog/art rock. I challenge anyone to listen to the first side of Tago Mago and tell me there isn't more excitement contained in those 18 minutes than the entirety of Floyd's discography overall.

[Dr Rock]

Most of the Pink Floyd fans I knew in my hometown only listened to the later stuff, while stoned. They owned about 12 albums including the best of Bob Marley which they also played repeatedly stoned.

[23 Daves]

Most of the Pink Floyd fans I knew in my hometown only listened to the later stuff, while stoned. They owned about 12 albums including the best of Bob Marley which they also played repeatedly stoned.

There are two types of Floyd fans, I think - the stoners, who are obsessed with the sound of "Dark Side of the Moon" and the lovely, smooth, fluffy production of it all (though for my tastes, you're better off listening to a lot of 60s psychedelia stoned, especially the stuff with heavy phasing). Then there's the people who genuinely love a lot of their output and enjoy other stuff besides.

Take me, for example. I love "Atom Heart Mother", I love Can. Though admittedly I'm not really into most prog - for me its psychedelia and krautrock for the interesting stuff.

[the psyche intangible]

Most of the Pink Floyd fans I knew in my hometown only listened to the later stuff, while stoned. They owned about 12 albums including the best of Bob Marley which they also played repeatedly stoned.

Did they listen to 'Ritual De Lo Habitual' and 'The Second Coming' and wear vests and fucking stink of shit and old hair?

[Serge]

Okay, I've just read the thread title properly, and I don't think there's anything in Bowie's catalogue pre mid 80s that qualifies as hate worthy. So please disregard all of that.

What have you got against 'Never Let Me Down'?

I'm joking, of course. It's one of only two albums of his ('Tin Machine II' being the other) that I've never felt the urge to even own.

[greenman]

There are two types of Floyd fans, I think - the stoners, who are obsessed with the sound of "Dark Side of the Moon" and the lovely, smooth, fluffy production of it all (though for my tastes, you're better off listening to a lot of 60s psychedelia stoned, especially the stuff with heavy phasing). Then there's the people who genuinely love a lot of their output and enjoy other stuff besides.

Take me, for example. I love "Atom Heart Mother", I love Can. Though admittedly I'm not really into most prog - for me its psychedelia and krautrock for the interesting stuff.

Pre Darkside Floyd is pretty clearly a lead into Krautrock much more than more conventional prog rock both in terms of influence and style so I don't think the latter is really that rare at all, certainly the way I got into Krautrock.

To be fair the production on Darkside is excellent and a far cry from the aweful 80's gloss is would eventually lead into. That said I'd agree the album is popular mostly because its based around fairly conventional songs and relatively short instrumentals.

Wish You Were Here is definitely uneven, the first half of Shine on and the title track are great, the second half is pretty good but became a lot better given a chance to evolve in a live setting and Welcome to the Machine/Have a Cigar sound like what they were IMHO, quickly created filler. Machine especially shows you the difference between messing around with a synth and the kind of interesting atmospherics the bands had done before.

The best album of their commercially successful period was I'd say Animals. Stays truer to there strength of extended atmospheric compositions and somehow also offers one of the few good responses to Punk from a big 70's band without being some cheap attempt to ape it.

[Danger Man]

Any New Order album.

Technique is OK. Otherwise you are right.

[thraxx]

Everything by Led Zeppelin. Horrible sweaty cock music.

Nah mate.  Though I would agree that there's not a really a great album in there to hate because most Zep records are patchy; even the ones with 7 songs on.  Every album has a clutch of songs that make me not want to listen to it.  Houses of the Holy being the best example of that.  It's got Dyer Maker and The Crunge on it.  Those songs are astonishingly shit.  But it's also got The Rain Song, No Quarter and Over The Hills.  You can't call that horrible sweaty cock music.  Bron-y-aur?

[Jerzy Bondov]

It's this crock of shit, isn't it?


I don't think I've ever experienced a bigger disparity between critical reputation and my own reaction, which is one of open disgust. It's just not good enough. It would be okay, if I didn't hate all of the tedious fucking woeful songs on it, especially Waterfall. Ian Brown's voice is a howl of nothing, a miserable damp thin wafer floating in a cup of warm water. In my opinion.

[Jockice]

I think it's okay. Quite listenable late 80s indie pop. But it's not the greatest album ever made. It's probably about the sixth-best album put out that year, That's all.

[holyzombiejesus]

Badly Drawn Boy's The Hour of the Bewilderbeast. Perhaps not 'great', although certainly lauded to fuck upon release, and whilst there's not enough about the record itself to hate, by god is Damon Gough a smackable thieving little cunt.

[SteveDave]

Screamadelica- I'm possibly not on the right drugs but it sounds too of it's time for me. Apart from Movin' On Up of course.

[Serge]

I think I've mentioned on here before that I had trouble accepting 'Screamadelica' as an album when it first came out because so many of the tracks had been released previously as singles, all of which I already owned and had played to death. McGee admitted later on that it was put out almost as a compilation because they needed a Scream album to put out at that point. It was only when I bought it on CD years later that I could finally listen to it as a whole album.

[23 Daves]

It's this crock of shit, isn't it?


I don't think I've ever experienced a bigger disparity between critical reputation and my own reaction, which is one of open disgust. It's just not good enough. It would be okay, if I didn't hate all of the tedious fucking woeful songs on it, especially Waterfall. Ian Brown's voice is a howl of nothing, a miserable damp thin wafer floating in a cup of warm water. In my opinion.

It's a really tricky album to mount a defence for, because most of the criticisms are true. Ian Brown's singing is of a questionable quality, there isn't really a single new idea with its grooves (although, unlike a lot of the Britpop that followed in its wake, it's hard to trace any clearly copped riffs or melody lines) and its influence on the era is over-stated. Indeed, it was seen as a psychedelic throwback LP originally.

Still though, it's an album that's stayed with me throughout my life from the day I bought it forward. Barely a month goes by when I don't listen to at least some of it, and that's always been the case. It still has the power to make me feel incredibly good about the world, and above all else I just think it's an incredibly well-written album which doesn't really date. If it had come out last year or in 1966, it would have received, to greater or slightly lesser degrees, a keen and avid following.

[Dirty Boy]

Grace is a great song, the rest of it is tedious beyond belief.

Psychocandy has always left me completely unmoved.

Also, every "classic" Floyd album that isn't Piper.

[Blue Jam]

Alright, I don't hate it but I do remember listening to it all the way through for the first time and feeling incredibly underwhelmed. The "verse, chorus, verse, chorus, middle eight/guitar solo, chorus" song structure throughout is just so very trad and that wasn't what I had been expecting. Maybe it's more of an important album than a great one (now that's a whole other topic...) but lyrics and vocals aside it just doesn't sound all that rebellious and exciting to me- and PiL are better.