The most commercially unpalatable albums you habitually listen to

[BlodwynPig]

The LostProphets Play...Gary Glitter's Greatest Hits (Live)

[JesusAndYourBush]

The Manson Family sing the songs of Charles Manson (aka The Family Jams).

EDIT: In light of the previous post I have to add that I'm not even joking.

[jobotic]

My girlfriend when I was 17 had that and even then I thought it was a bit try hard, and a bit crap sounding.

Now a friend of mine in his fifties says it's quite good. Who to believe? My younger self or my friend?

[kidney]

Dunno about unpalatable but I frequently absolutely blast Confield by Autechre at work

I've been obsessed with Autechre for the last 6 months or so and Confield is perhaps their only major release that I haven't been able to connect with. I can appreciate it from a technical viewpoint because it sounds phenomenal but I just don't 'get' it.

That said, Pen Expers is possibly humanity's greatest feat to date.

[kalowski]

Honestly not trying to be "that" guy but I wouldn't class TMR as unpalatable. It has loads of genuinely catchy bits in isolation and it's way too well known and appreciated to be truly smelly and evil.

Actually, fair point. The title says "commercially unpalatable" so some of this "oh so offensive" stuff is probably correct. TMR is just far out enough for most people I know to yell, "Turn this off!!!" but is it unpalatable? Possibly not.

I do remember one year at university bunch of 1st year undergrads were lounging around on the lawn outside my room listing to bollocks like Jagged Little Pill, the Holy Bible, Grace and some shit by Dodgy so I put my speaker out the window and played TMR until they all fucked off.
Childish, but I was 43 23!

[Sin Agog]

Actually, fair point. The title says "commercially unpalatable" so some of this "oh so offensive" stuff is probably correct. TMR is just far out enough for most people I know to yell, "Turn this off!!!" but is it unpalatable? Possibly not.

I do remember one year at university bunch of 1st year undergrads were lounging around on the lawn outside my room listing to bollocks like Jagged Little Pill, the Holy Bible, Grace and some shit by Dodgy so I put my speaker out the window and played TMR until they all fucked off.
Childish, but I was 43 23!

I did worse.  I used to go to this hipster bar frequented by douchebags like The Ordinary Boys.  One time I got so drunk that I man-handled the P.A. and demanded that they play the copy of Troutmask that I happened to have in my bag.  Luckily a member of staff successfully managed to convince me that my CD was scratched and that's why it suddenly stopped playing a few minutes in.

[grassbath]

Thought of nominating Laurie Anderson's Big Science, but then of course 'O Superman' (one of the greatest pieces of music ever made) astonishingly hit #2 in the UK.

[sevendaughters]

of course TMR is unpalatable. I used to work in a factory where you could take turns playing CDs. I played XTRMTR by Primal Scream because I though 'oh, it's dance music, everyone will be fine'. Nope. Too noisy and weird. Off by track 2. TMR wouldn't make it past Frownland.

[Ambient Sheep]

His Name Is Alive - "Home Is In Your Head"

Swallow - "Blowback"

A. R. Kane - "69"

I'm sure there's more.

[Jockice]

I bought Clock DVA's Thirst when I was 15 not really knowing what to expect, but knowing that the only track I'd heard from it, 4 Hours, was a fantastic song (and still to this day my favourite ever single by a Sheffield band). However, a lot of the rest of the album is...how shall we put it?...difficult. To the extent that I ended up sitting on the end of my bed crying, not because the music had put the fear into me but because I couldn't believe I'd wasted money buying it. However, I persisted and love it now. My vinyl copy's long gone but I got someone to do me a CD copy a few years ago and it still comes out quite regularly.

Jeffrey Dahmer was a fan too. In fact I think the story about him listening to them when he got arrested was one of my few exclusives. Unless someone else did it first of course.

[NoSleep]

It was that incarnation of Clock DVA when I picked on those guys, who subsequently parted company with Adi Newton and formed The Box. I'd say the "most commercially unpalatable" aspect of their sound must be Charlie Collins' flute and sax; he sounds completely self-taught but he's using free jazz and free improvisation as his starting points. And it's those areas that he has pursued post-Box. It was my own love of free improvisation (Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, Han Bennink, Paul Rutherford) combined with my interest in post punk that attracted me to "Thirst" in the first place (so there were no tears on first listen).

In that light, I think my nominee for this thread would have to be "Machine Gun" by Peter Brotzmann. Literally an assault on the senses; liberating and cathartic. I've heard it said that the onslaught presented on the album was Brotzmann's answer to critics who had dismissed his music as merely noise; "No, this is noise!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxTZ2qA4brE

Brotzmann still has it to this day. Went to see his Chicago Tentet at Cafe OTO, along with our very own benthalo, in 2011:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSa4tTfVsqI

[Jockice]

It was that incarnation of Clock DVA when I picked on those guys, who subsequently parted company with Adi Newton and formed The Box. I'd say the "most commercially unpalatable" aspect of their sound must be Charlie Collins' flute and sax; he sounds completely self-taught but he's using free jazz and free improvisation as his starting points. And it's those areas that he has pursued post-Box. It was my own love of free improvisation (Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, Han Bennink, Paul Rutherford) combined with my interest in post punk that attracted me to "Thirst" in the first place (so there were no tears on first listen)

I'm Facebook friends with Charlie these days and when I told that story during a discussion about Thirst he sneered (in a nice way) because by the time he was 15 he'd already digested Miles Davis's complete works and other things that I'd never even heard of.

Usually when people start claiming that they were into really uncommercial stuff before they'd even been properly through puberty I call bullshit but with him I suspect it's true. He would, wouldn't he?

[Jockice]

I may have also mentioned on here that at the time I bought it I had plasters on both legs following an operation so I had to get a local-authority funded taxi to school.

I shared this with a really sweet girl who was a couple of years younger than me, went to another school and also had medical problems meaning she wasn't able to get there any other way.

A mate at school wanted to borrow Thirst so when I got into the cab with it in one of those orange Virgin Records bags, she went: "Ooh, what's the record? Is it Duran Duran?"

Er, not quite I replied and showed her the sleeve to her look of something between incomprehension and disgust. Things were never quite the same between us after that...

[Jockice]

Ignore. As you were planning to anyway.

[NoSleep]

I'm Facebook friends with Charlie these days and when I told that story during a discussion about Thirst he sneered (in a nice way) because by the time he was 15 he'd already digested Miles Davis's complete works and other things that I'd never even heard of.

Looking Charlie up on Discogs, his blurb says: "One of only a handful of musicians to have played both Derek Bailey's Company Week and Top Of The Pops."

I similarly digested Miles Davis, Derek Bailey, Carla Bley, Lifetime in my late teens. Before Derek Bailey started his Company weeks, he used to play Sunday nights at Ronnie Scotts (50p to get in!) in the early 70's with his various colleagues and solo. On some nights there were more people onstage than in the audience. The audience would just be me and a couple of other jazz geeks (and Lol Coxhill, someone I've seen more times as an audience member than onstage)(Charles Bullen of This Heat tells me he was at several of the gigs I've described to him, too; way before the formation of This Heat, this is). It really wasn't something you shared with your fellow teens at the time, so unhip it seemed at the time (Derek even looked like a sociology teacher). It's so odd to me that it's become a hipster thing as the decades have rolled by. I remember spotting Ari Up and Viv Albertine in the audience of one of the Company Weeks (1980 or 1981; I remember it was the same night that somebody died at an Only Ones gig held at the Lyceum) which would be a little under a decade later.

[The Boston Crab]

Reminds me of the Best Show call where it turns out the guy is really into nu-metal.

[famethrowa]

Reminds me of the Best Show call where it turns out the guy is really into nu-metal.

Yes! My thoughts exactly. The Music Scholar.

[NoSleep]

Reminds me of the Best Show call where it turns out the guy is really into nu-metal.

In what way?

[the ouch cube]

By the standards of some of my workmates, virtually everything I like is unpalatable. If you consider even QoTSA or the Pixies to be tuneless noise, there's no hope for you being able to cope with anything else.

The noisiest CD on my shelves is probably 'Tribulation' by Skullflower, but it's not really a habitual listen by its very nature

[PlanktonSideburns]

Been re-listening to Strapping Young Lad's 'City' at ear-bleeding volume in the car. Actually got loads of catchy tunes but it's also one of the most abrasive fuck yous ever made.

yes to this. beautiful melodies icing a mushroom cloud cake

[Mark Steels Stockbroker]

You may be interested in Camden Joy's novel Pan, based around the notorious gig by The Fall at Brownies club in 1998 (the one where they fought on stage, and afterwards Steve Hanley quit after 20 years service) also has a thread about the imminent collapse of the music industry due to the threat of internet streaming, and the conceit that Trout Mask Replica was in fact the biggest-selling album of all time but the statistic has been suppressed.

Someone mentioned Crass - isn't it the case that at their 1981 peak they were selling enough to get in the top 5, but they weren't/weren't allowed to be counted in chart returns?

"Uncommercial" is relative to expectations. Some impressionable youngsters think The Holy Bible is an extreme piece of work, even though it was launched with a big press campaign, it had 3 chart singles that each had fancy videos... and it undersold expectations and was described as "a commercial disaster" by Nicky Wire, on the eve of their megaselling comeback 4th album.

I suppose Perverted By Language by The Fall would be my nomination for this thread, which I think is superior to Hex Enduction Hour even though the latter now seems to be canonised as a Classic Album. I don't think it's particularly extreme musically or lyrically, and it's obvious they didn't have the budget to give it the effects some of the guitar work needed (also the retakes - Craig clearly fucks up at one point in "Garden"). But in its original incarnation of 8 tracks and none of the contemporaneous singles included, it would be a difficult proposition to sell commercially. Unlike Hex it doesn't have a sleeve that advertises itself to the Crass/alternative fans, it looks a bit slick (and has that 80s graphic design lettering, possibly the only truly dated feature on any Fall album).

[NoSleep]

Someone mentioned Crass - isn't it the case that at their 1981 peak they were selling enough to get in the top 5, but they weren't/weren't allowed to be counted in chart returns?

I've heard this, too. I remember an article in NME that said they were selling more records than ABBA but they weren't counted because they were selling them for less than the normal retail price (and even stated on the covers "pay no more than **p"). Crass and other bands, like Poison Girls, completely bypassed the music industry, even organising alternative venues to the standard agency-bound circuits; playing town halls and squats (I remember there was a squat gig organised at the Finsbury Park Astoria after it had shut down as the Rainbow).

[Mark Steels Stockbroker]

Billy Bragg pinched the "Pay No More Than..." for his early albums.

[purlieu]

I suppose Perverted By Language by The Fall would be my nomination for this thread, which I think is superior to Hex Enduction Hour even though the latter now seems to be canonised as a Classic Album. I don't think it's particularly extreme musically or lyrically, and it's obvious they didn't have the budget to give it the effects some of the guitar work needed (also the retakes - Craig clearly fucks up at one point in "Garden").

Trivia - my tutor at university produced Perverted by Language. He also played keyboard on some Steps songs in the '90s.

[Mark Steels Stockbroker]

Trivia - my tutor at university produced Perverted by Language. He also played keyboard on some Steps songs in the '90s.

Steve Parker? Did he have any amazing stories?

[purlieu]

No, I was just talking to him about the band I was in at the time and he mentioned how he'd produced some post-punk albums back in the day, and proceeded to get a copy of Perverted by Language out of a drawer. I was going through a 'trying to pretend to myself that I like The Fall' phase and was quite excited ('Eat Y'self Fitter' was my go-to Fall tune). He also mentioned Wire, although it turned out to be just some live engineering on Turns and Strokes. Nice bloke, though.