"The 100 Most Middling Albums Of All Time!"

[Ciarán2]

An article in the university newspaper's music section gave me an idea.

Forget the classics, bugger the laughably dreadful. Let's consider the middle-ground. Let's discuss the records that you don't really need to own at all actually, but it's only £8.99 so what the hell. The things that make you go "hmm, it's alright but I preferred their last one". A list refreshingly free of "OK Computers" and pictures of Kevin Rowland in knickers or Dennis Wilson bottle-feeding goats. Let's not even make it a round Top 100, let's get all disinterested after about seven records have been mentioned.

I nominate: Electronic's "Raise The Pressure" (1996). Some people would discuss their debut in terms of...actually no, people probably wouldn't even discuss 1991's Electronic at all except to say that it was a bit of a stop-gap between "Technique" and "Republic". I think "Electronic" is a pearl, a record which "Raise The Pressure" unexhiliratingly fails to better. Not that "Raise The Pressure" is a complete let-down either. It has a nice lead single "Forbidden City". Nice feedback on that one. There's some plinky plonky italio-house piano bits which were a bit dated. "Second Nature" was decidedly ok. There was a lot of filler. "Until The End Of Time" went on a bit. there was nothing to rival "Getting Away With It" or "Idiot Country" or "Gangster". It didn't make you want to go out and take a lot of drugs (as Peter Paphides once pointed out, The Beloved's second album achieved this but "unlike their first album, this time it's for all the wrong reasons"). No, "Raise The Pressure" made you want to go and put on a cup of tea. Possibly a Bourbon Cream biscuit on the side. Q Magazine gave it three stars. Three stars from Q is the most mediocre review a record could hope to aspire to.

[fudgemonkey]

Keane-Hopes And Fears

Hard to like or dislike. Okay to play in the car.
Chubby faces and rosy cheeks all around.
Nice piano, a bit bland. Makes Belle and Sebastien sound loud, but admittedly they are a good band ie I Fought In A War.

[23 Daves]

Ah!  This is a bit like a Lee and Herring "Celebration of Mediocrity" thread.

When I was last having a clear-out, I estimated rather depressingly that about 60% of my record collection consisted of middle-ground albums - stuff too good to throw away, but too inconsistent or middling to really deserve to take up so much shelf space.  I considered converting them all into MP3s then selling them, and may well still do this if I actually get around to buying an MP3 player.  Anyway...

Manic Street Preachers "This Is My Truth, Tell Me Yours" is a definite contender.  It has on it, of course, "You're Tender and Tired", "Tsunami", and "If You Tolerate This...", three perfectly good tracks that, under certain moods and circumstances, are nice additions to one's life.  However, the rest of the album is just a blur and haze of pleasant half-heartedness.  "South Yorkshire Mass Murderer" even has a mediocre, middling lyrical ending which is "The ending to this song/ well, I haven't really thought of one".  That may not be an accurate quotation, but I'm sorry to say the album is too average for me to bother trekking to the shelf to see if I got it bang on.

A controversial contender for me is also Blur's "Modern Life Is Rubbish".  Some vaguely enjoyable buzzy guitars, snappy phrases and empty gestures that make for nice background noise but show no real depth or imagination. Only "For Tomorrow" saves it from complete and total mediocrity.  It "invented" Britpop apparently - well, yes, but Bill Haley and the Comets allegedly "invented" Rock n Roll, but they certainly weren't responsible for its glamour or any other number of vital ingrediants.  Still, never mind, Blur would go on to make "The Great Escape", an album everyone (including the band) mistakenly believes is shit when it's actually rather good.

Then... let's nominate Curve's "Doppelganger" shall we?  Toni Halliday coos about paranoia, alienation and neurosis in a wannabe Plath kind of way that's not terrible but not remarkable either, drums rattle nicely but not too threateningly, guitars distort and screech in a measured manner... and if you plotted a graph of the album's peaks and troughs, you'd be left with a line flatter than the landscape of Essex.  At one point in the early nineties, we thought these people might be the future of rock and roll.  Astonishingly, I've since come to the conclusion that Lush and Slowdive were both far better, though for some reason I never purchased their work at the time.

[trotsky assortment]

David Bowie - Hours...

Don't get me wrong, I love Dayyyy-vid and I like this album too, but after the envolope pushing experimentation of both '1. Outside' and 'Earthling', this is so...uh...safe.  

I know the joy of a new Bowie product partly comes from never quite knowing what he'll give us, but I think it's a great shame that he abandoned 'The Nathan Adler Diaries' after '1. Outside'.

[falafel]

Air - 10,000 Hz Legend

S'alright.

[Nuts 'n Gum]

The Coral-Magic And Medicine. meh.

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

Franz Ferdinand's debut. It's... nice.

[TraceyQ]

Oh, Purlease, Daves! Gala was very average... "Hey hey, Helen"... what the hell was all that about? "Baby Talk" is a good track, yeah, but it's no "Split Into Fractions" is it? Doppelganger held my interest for much longer than any kind of strange attraction to Miki Berenyi did.




(any mention of La Berenyi should be followed up with a pic, it's The Law)

[Frinky]

A controversial contender for me is also Blur's "Modern Life Is Rubbish".  Some vaguely enjoyable buzzy guitars, snappy phrases and empty gestures that make for nice background noise but show no real depth or imagination. Only "For Tomorrow" saves it from complete and total mediocrity.  It "invented" Britpop apparently - well, yes, but Bill Haley and the Comets allegedly "invented" Rock n Roll, but they certainly weren't responsible for its glamour or any other number of vital ingrediants.  Still, never mind, Blur would go on to make "The Great Escape", an album everyone (including the band) mistakenly believes is shit when it's actually rather good.

Woah woah woah, let's be careful with the crazy words, yes? You'll have someone's eye out. Firstly, The Great Escape suffers from the same problem as Think Tank - too much shit covering some of the best stuff they've ever written (He Thought Of Cars, Best Days, Yuko and Hiro, Could Be You) - so no, it's not shit, but it's not brilliant, and it's not anywhere near as good as Modern Life.

There's not a single bad song on Modern Life - I think the NME dismissed "Turn It Up" as purile rubbish but, no, that's bollocks. Maybe Sunday Sunday could be thought of as shit if you hear it more than 5 times a year, but still. "Buzzy Guitars"? You've not heard MLIR in a while, I take it? I'd like to hear one example of buzzy axes on there. It's probably the most sonically varied album Coxon has put out in his entire career that doesn't rely on noise/feedback. Some of the band's best melodies and hooks came from there. Chemical World, the ending to Oily Water. What about the little Intermission ditty? Or the la la la's on the end of Coping (that the fucking Kasier Chiefs seem to be making a career from)? What about Pressure on Julian's dirty, swirling, oppressive guitars? And those all-too-rare balls-to-the-walls rock songs that they excelled at? You get two on here! Two! Advert and Coping.

Anyway, if MLIR was so bland, the material wouldn't have transferred to a live setting so well, would it? The MLIR era tours were probably Blur's highpoint as a performing band (although 97-98 were pretty spectacular).

There's not one Blur album that belongs in this thread (not even Leisure), becuase Blur were never mediocre - they've had one or two shit songs on the albums, but they never distracted from the better material on there, which pulled the albums way over the mediocrity line.

Also: I like Doppleganger, too.

[Frinky]

I'd like to see "Meltdown" by Ash on there. How did it go so wrong? In fact, I don't even know what's wrong with the album itself.

Turn it on, yeah! Power pop and melodies and harmonies and solos and breaks and drum fills and here comes the slow song and here comes one twice as fast yeah this is fantastic oh it's over now and suddenly I don't remember one single fucking thing about it.

Such a decline from 1977, but not even in a bad way. They've just lost their edge, I guess.

[mayer]

I think it's a great shame that he abandoned 'The Nathan Adler Diaries' after '1. Outside'.

Of course, every twelve months or so he'll mumble something about getting 2. Contamination out, but I doubt it'll ever happen really.

I'd add both Heathen and Reality onto the list too. Both are bookended by fantastic tracks but the middles are... middling. Neither are bad albums, and the production and sound is terribly nice, but they don't thrill me the way Earthling or 1. Outside or even bits of Tin Machine ( I Can't Read, Heaven's In Here) or Let's Dance (Modern Love, Let's Dance, China Girl) do.

They're certainly not bad albums, but I guess they represent Bowie finally hitting respectable middle age, and granted, pulling it off. But yes, he should spend six months in a room with Eno neatening up some of that alleged 25 hours of material and put out 2. Contamination before the end of the decade, maybe even record some new material for it, make it a proper album.

[jimmy jazz]

Weezer, The Green Album

They all know what they're doing, verse chorus verse. Start the line high and get lower seems to be the plan:

"WHO put on your heart"

Lot of Oohs and Do's, Photograph is a good song though. Just doesn't do anything.

[Emergency Lalla Ward Ten]

There's a fine line between this and 'Over-rated albums' isn't there? I'm not sure of the difference, really. I would nominate Definitely Maybe, but mayer will tweak me.

So I'll stick to safe ground and say 'Youth and Young Manhood' by Kings of Leon. You never hear people talk about them much any more, do you? They were the Arctic Monkeys of 2004!

[23 Daves]

I'm not backing down on MLIR at all I'm afraid, and in answer to the question that was posed, I indeed listened to it only a few weeks ago.  Sorry, but the entire album is utterly lacking in the subtletly and the touches that came along with their later work - the lyrics are middle-of-the-road, blank, self-conscious post-modern nonsense, the songs follow fairly predictable paths, and I can't hear a single bit of adventure or imagination anywhere.  And the Kaiser Chiefs are yet another desperately mediocre band, so I'm not going to be won over by that defence.  I like Blur, but I'm really sorry to say that I just think of MLIR as being one of their weakest albums, not a terrible one, just middling.

As for Curve... I fancied Toni Halliday far more than Miki out of Lush, and I've half a guilty feeling that my lust for her probably fuelled many a Curve purchase when it shouldn't have.  A lot of their material sounds like sonic trickery over content to me now.

I knew my choices wouldn't go down well, but I see nobody's rushed forward to defend the Manics yet.... even though if I had to pick an album of those three I wouldn't get rid of, that would probably be the one I'd save.

I would also have nominated a few mid-period Pink Floyd efforts, but I know that would have really set everyone into over-drive.  And not an Interstellar one either.  Ho ho.

[Robot Devil]

Weezer, The Green Album

They all know what they're doing, verse chorus verse. Start the line high and get lower seems to be the plan:

"WHO put on your heart"

"Slave" is on Maladroit.

I'd have to say The Killers - "Hot Fuss", I don't hate it like lots of people seem to, in fact I quite like "Smile Like You Mean It" and that new one wot sounds like "Barbarism Begins At Home", but the album tracks are uniformly middling, and I could do with never hearing "Somebody Told Me" again.

[Goldentony]

its only half good is 'hot fuss' the singles are great, along with glamarous indie rock n roll, other than that though the rest of the album is a bit forgettable.

[mayer]

There's a fine line between this and 'Over-rated albums' isn't there? I'm not sure of the difference, really.

Over-rated albums

Albums that one believes has achieved a level critical or public acclaim that outweighs what it artistically warrants.

This is a question of two things:

(i) What one believes an album artistically warrants
(ii) What other people think, especially "the media".


Middling albums

Albums that aren't great. But not awful. They don't inspire, nor repulse. You can like them but never truly love them. Perhaps they're good but flawed, too much filler. Or they show promise but don't live up to it, falling short of greatness by a few lengths for any number of reasons.

The perceptions of others, including "the media", is totally irrelevant to what one believes is a "middling album". It's purely about one's likes and dislikes. Any debate about this topic need have no reference to "what other people, especially the media, think".


(It's okay, you don't need to thank me).

So really, you don't need to post in this thread, do you? You're trying to shift the topic to your turf again, yup?

Re. Youth and Young Manhood, I thought KoL were just not my thing at all, middling would be right, in my opinion. There was one single on the second album (The Bucket, I think it was called) that I thought was fabulous though.

[fbb bastard]

I knew my choices wouldn't go down well, but I see nobody's rushed forward to defend the Manics yet

hang on now daves....i have been a bit busy thats all :)

granted the tracks you mentioned are quality and fair point "south yorkshire mass murderer" is a witless lyrical disgrace but.........

"nobody loved me"  "black dog on my shoulder" "ready for drowning"....these are examples of nothing more than pleasant half heartedness? me thinks not, especially compared the true middling averageness (let robeson and found that soul excepted) of the following two albums. their last excellent album.

and though i fall over myself to praise to the skies all of their other albums "pablo honey" is an especially middling, s'alright album.

[mayer]

I think that The Everlasting, If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next and My Little Empire were fabulous, the other songs mentioned are okay, and the rest really was a load of toss. Middling is exactly right.

[23 Daves]

The interesting thing about calling something medicore or "middling" is that it causes greater offence that simply calling it "crap", doesn't it?  If something is described as crap or unlistenable, then the fan can at least smugly say that the critic is missing the point, has cloth ears, or is in some way mentally challenged.  Faint praise, on the other hand, always angers people - it deflates whatever alternative danger or quality content they believe the work has.

As I've said before, I honestly think that vast majority of albums I own are plain average, really, but I still couldn't bring myself to ditch them.

Another, of course, is Teardrop Explodes "Wilder" - take "Tiny Children", "Great Dominions" and "Passionate Friend" out of the equation, and it's a lot of pleasant background noise, really.  Another flatliner.  I know that's not a view shared by everyone on here as well, though.

[trotsky assortment]

I think it's a great shame that he abandoned 'The Nathan Adler Diaries' after '1. Outside'.

Of course, every twelve months or so he'll mumble something about getting 2. Contamination out, but I doubt it'll ever happen really.

Seeing as he had his teeth 'fixed' as to look more the part for Nathan Adler, you'd think he'd make more of an effort.  ;o)

I'd add both Heathen and Reality onto the list too. Both are bookended by fantastic tracks but the middles are... middling. Neither are bad albums, and the production and sound is terribly nice, but they don't thrill me the way Earthling or 1. Outside or even bits of Tin Machine ( I Can't Read, Heaven's In Here) or Let's Dance (Modern Love, Let's Dance, China Girl) do.

Actually, me neither.  I always think I like them more than 'Hours', but at least I know the names of songs from that album.  

It's interesting you should bring up 'Let's Dance', since after I whinged about 'Hours...', someone said I only disliked it because it was a pop record in comparison with the previous couple of albums.  I've no problem with David Bowie the four minute pop-song man, as I too love 'Let's Dance' and bits of 'Tonight' and 'Never Let Me Down'.  I don't dislike 'Hours...' because it's a pop album - it's just a bit dull.

(Save de-railing this thread any further, is there a proper Bowie thread here anywhere?)

[trotsky assortment]

Oh, Purlease, Daves! Gala was very average... "Hey hey, Helen"... what the hell was all that about? "Baby Talk" is a good track, yeah, but it's no "Split Into Fractions" is it? Doppelganger held my interest for much longer than any kind of strange attraction to Miki Berenyi did.

(any mention of La Berenyi should be followed up with a pic, it's The Law)

Thanks TQ!  It's like the last decade never happened.  Happy days!  Oddly enough, Lush popped up while I was listening to the radio tuner at LastFM yesterday - probably the first time I'd heard them since the 90s.

[lankinpark]

Every AC/DC album except Powerage, Blow Up Your Video and possibly Back in Black. And they're all dangerously close.

There's nothing really wrong with any of them, bar the odd crap song here and there and the ever-present feeling of deja vu when each song starts, but they are all utterly underwhelming. Put one on and you get 35-45 minutes of enjoyable rock music, yet you're left at the end feeling like you haven't listened to a whole album. I find it difficult to listen to any of them all the way through, because they make me feel like I'm killing time. Like I've thrown an AC/DC album on to keep the silence at bay while I decide what I really want to listen to.

The worst offender is The Razor's Edge. Three of the first four tracks are stunning and the other ("Fire Your Guns") is above average, plus I've got a soft spot for "Goodbye and Good Riddance to Back Luck". But the rest of the album is so lacking in substance that it might as well not be there. It truly is wasted time listening to it but unless you're thinking, there's nothing actively offensive in the music to make you switch off.

[Frinky]

I'm not backing down on MLIR at all I'm afraid,

Well, you can apologise all you like, but I'm still waiting to see you quantify the apparent lack of hooks/provide examples of "buzzy guitars".

[Suttonpubcrawl]

I've been thinking long and hard about this, I think I'd class Invisible Touch by Genesis as a very middling album. It's hated by lots of Genesis fans and disliked by me for being so far from their most exciting and best music. Despite this, if you put aside your preconceptions it's not actually terrible, it's just not all that good. It has one real stand out track, In Too Deep. This track stands out as being one of the most appallingly awful things you'll ever hear, I mean really what happened when they were recording it? Did Mike and Tony go down the pub leaving Phil alone to record one of his solo tracks and pass it off as a Genesis song? Apart from that, the rest is fairly inoffensive pop-pap. A little bit catchy but with no real substance to it. They have a bit of a go at an old style prog 10-minuter (Domino), but their heart isn't in it and it sounds like a pop song with an abortive prog song  tacked on the end in which Phil Collins goes mad and sings about rivers of blood. While this kind of thing works to fairly good effect on Home By The Sea, it doesn't here and just ends up sounding half arsed. Again, not too bad, it's just a bit unsatisfying like eating a slice of low-fat cake. An interesting instrumental in the form of amusingly titled album closer "The Brazilian", but it doesn't really go anywhere and you finish the track and album feeling like nothing much of interest has really happened. As I said at the start, it really wasn't bad, but it certainly wasn't good.

[Detective John Kimble]

In the same vein...

Genesis - And Then There Were Three...

Y'know, some moments on this one...there's a nice feel to 'Undertow', that synth line in 'Deep In The Motherlode' is real good, nothing ridiculously crap (Except for 'Ballad of Big'), not bad, not great.  Only one real stand-out, memorable track though - and indeed, it's the single.  Good old 'Follow You, Follow Me' is.  Mediocre, and admittedly so.

I think 'From Genesis to Revelation' would easily fit too.  Not much that really signifies where they were going to go, just a fairly average collection of songs.

'Eye in the Sky' by Alan Parsons Project, Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe also pretty much fit.  Actually, albums by a lot of those '80s prog bands probably fit - Asia, U.K, etc. The prog supergroup albums.  

Perhaps a more controversial prog one:

ELP - Works Vol. 1  

Either total cack or great, usually, but I reckon that it pretty much cancels itself out. Each side has it's moments - the 3rd movement of Emerson's 'Piano Concerto', Lake's 'C'est La Vie', Palmer's 'The Enemy God...'...but it's balanced out by mediocrity or crapness.  'L.A Nights', the new 'Tank', 'Closer to Believing', 'Hallowed Be Thy Name'...nowt special.

It's probably best illustrated by the full band side, and the 2 songs on it.  The first is 'Fanfare for the Common Man', which, even through overplay and sports programmes, still cooks over 9 minutes.  It's as catchy as all hell, and represents some of the best of ELP.  The second song is 'Pirates'...13 minutes overlong, completely uninteresting, by the numbers, just meanders along while Lake shouts out some of his worst lyrics (Actually, Sinfield wrote it I think - so it'll be some of his worst instead).  A total bore that represents some of the worst of ELP.  Like the album as a whole.

'Works Vol. 2', while the ELP fans usually hate it, is just so much better.  Compact, attention-grabbing and above all, fun.  And it has 'I Believe In Father Christmas' on it, which is better than anything on Vol. 1 bar 'Fanfare'.

[smufflebob]

I'm not backing down on MLIR at all I'm afraid,

Well, you can apologise all you like, but I'm still waiting to see you quantify the apparent lack of hooks/provide examples of "buzzy guitars".

I have to disagree with MLIR, whenever I hear the first bars of  for tomorrow it brings back great memories of discovering blur. Now the great escape there's a dissapointment...

[lankinpark]

While I fully agree with both Genesis nominations so far, I'd have to (controversially?) nominate The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway as their most middling album, in every sense of the word. It's overrated and underrated in equal measures, when actually it's almost exactly halfway between excellent and crap. It can't decide whether it wants to be serious modern rock or daft prog, so we end up with a strange hybrid where the prog bits never progress and the potential credibility is undermined by lines like "Don't delay, dock the dick" and "no time for romantic escape when your fluffy heart is ready for rape".

There are some great songs (the title track, Broadway Melody, Carpet Crawlers, Anyway), a few actively crap ones (Grand Parade of Lifeless Packaging, Counting Out Time, The Colony of Slippermen), and a couple that fall between the two stools (In The Cage, Back in NYC) but most of the album is just insignificant: inconsequential instrumentals, songs too short to make any impact, songs with little or no discernable melody, some pointless rehashing towards the end, and five minutes of unlistenable padding masquerading as experimentation. The only thing worth noticing in the second half of the second disc is the synth riff in Riding The Scree, and that's marred by being attached to a song that sounds like it was knocked off during a fag break as filler.

If you break the album up into 10-15 minute segments, each one contains one song which is significant to the overall feel of the album. The rest is just in between.

Thinking about it though, quite a few Genesis albums come in the "middling" category. Duke is almost entirely flat, with a single peak (Turn It On Again) and a single trough (Misunderstanding). The first side of Foxtrot does all the technical stuff perfectly but doesn't connect with me in any meaningful way. Trespass is six tracks of beautiful insignificance. Wind and Wuthering is virtually all second rate and by-numbers. Sometimes I forget why I love this band so.

[lankinpark]

Now I've got myself thinking...

Queen - A Day at the Races. Sandwiched between A Night at the Opera (Bohemian Rhapsody, You're My Best Friend) and News of the World (We Will Rock You, We Are The Champions), it throws out a couple of second-rate classics and lots of pointless prettiness. It's like Night with the edges trimmed off - where Night took in about a million genres in ten songs with lengths ranging from just over one minute to eight-and-a-half, Day sticks firmly around the 3-5 minute mark for its ten songs and - apart from a couple of rock-out moments - is virtually all piano ballads with varying degrees of schmaltz. The theatrics are toned down, the whimsy is mostly absent, the hooks are blunter, and even the cover looks washed out next to the vibrant pinks, blues and oranges of Night. There's only one bad song on here (White Man), giving it a 90% hit rate, but I only ever listen to it because I'm sick of the better stuff.

[Suttonpubcrawl]

Oooh, sacrilege! No objection to the stuff about Lamb and I've got little to dispute about Trespass (apart from the Knife, that's great, and White Mountain is pretty decent). Duke is great though! I'd say about half of it is excellent, most of the rest is very good and it's only really Please Don't Ask and Misunderstanding (both Collins tracks, hmmm) that seriously let it down. Cul-De-Sac suffers from the usual Tony Banks lyrics problem (I mean honestly, they are dire) and is definitely one of the less good songs on the album but it's still enjoyable. Alone Tonight is also not quite up to the standard of some of the other songs, but then some of the other songs are incredibly good.

I can see what you mean about the first side of Foxtrot but for me only Time Table and Get'em Out By Friday have problems. Time Table just doesn't really interest me much, the tune is a bit plodding and I'd say it's probably me least favourite on the album. Get'em Out By Friday is a bit stodgy for me, full of twiddling organs and all that sort of prog stuff but not all that exciting. It's like a full English breakfast compared to a Thai curry (I like food analogies, it must be because I like food). The lyrics are great though and I can't seriously dislike a song that features a character called Satin Peter. Watcher and Can-utility are excellent though, really really brilliant songs.

Wind and Wuthering is one of my favourite Genesis albums and it's always been a bit confusing for me the fact that so many people don't like it. I'm going to be a bit bold here and say that there isn't a bad track on it. I think the lowest point is One For The Vine, that definitely does drag a bit but has some nice sections and if they'd trimmed off some of the flab it would have been great. Yes, I like Your Own Special Way. How can I defend it? I'm not sure really, I just like the atmosphere of it. Same goes for All In A Mouse's Night and in fact the whole of the album. I think the cover art for the album really suited it, it has a kind of dimly lit, foggy atmosphere, like you're out in the wild surrounded by fog but can dimly see through it or at least imagine what's on the other side. It makes my mind wonder and imagine what's out there, even if I can't see it.