[Music] Most over-rated albums

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Weststander

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Aug 25, 2011
73,122
Withdean area
Nothing they did from '67 onwards is "boy band". Helter skelter , I am the Walrus, Long and Winding Road, Nowhere Man, for example.

A Day in the Life
Ticket to Ride
Here Comes The Sun
Yesterday
Strawberry Fields
In My Life
While My Guitar Gentle Weeps
You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away

all immense. Revered by countless musicians since, in the Springsteen doc last week he said they and the Stones changed everything.
 






Stato

Well-known member
Dec 21, 2011
7,836
No it ain't. Never was! Mega bore and SOOoooo pretentious!
I kind of wish I agreed with you. It would have saved me from buying a dozen more of their albums searching for anything else that comes close. It's been a fairly fruitless search.

They're a very strange band, with strange relationships and lots of strange choices. I can understand why some might not be moved by the sounds. However, I can't see that there is any pretence in 'Pet Sounds'. Wison was too much of a naïf for that. It's merely the result of a Phil Spector obsessive making the most of the access he had to huge studio time and LA's finest session musicians. He was off his face and he was he was on the way to losing his mind, but he certainly wasn't pretending. His stated aim was just to try to get close to 'Be My Baby'. He wasn't going to tell the world he had all the answers like John Lennon tried to. At this stage he seemed to know himself to be a bit too dumb to write the lyrics. This is before Van Dyke Parks got deep. Tony Asher's words are fairly sincere and uncomplicated. When you hear the lyrics Wilson did write when it got to the album 'Love You', it's probably a blessed relief that he didn't try.

However, pretentious is a perfectly adequate description of bell-ends like me who bang on about it. I'll certainly grant you that.
 




BadFish

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Oct 19, 2003
20,094
FFS this isn’t a thread about bands/ singers you don’t like :lolol:
If we are honest, this is exactly what this thread is about!

A bunch of people giving their subjective negative opinion on albums other people like.

'Anything by . . . ' is translated to 'i don't like a band that other people do.

😂

I fully agree that Queen are shit though.
 




BadFish

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Oct 19, 2003
20,094
The Stone Roses discussion is interesting. When we're talking about most 'over-rated' I guess we mean hyped up and venerated by critics and so on. I was living in a sort of hippy commune in North Wales when it came out. We had no telly, no radio (except for Atlantic 252), only got a paper every other week or so - so we weren't influenced by any hype, promotion or crowd fervour. And generally, our main music intake was going to listen to The Jukes at the Bop in Menai Bridge once a fortnight for an evening of live rhythm and blues.

One lad bought the Stone Roses tape from a shop in Bangor - and to be honest, we couldn't listen to it enough, as it was so different to what we had (and Atlantic 252) and so different from some of the crap around in the late 1980s (first half of the 80s was fantastic - but post 86/7 it tailed off). We were all hooked. I went travelling for a year afterwards, and missed listening to it, so bought another tape of it in the outback of Western Australia.

So, however people might now think it was over-hyped - at the time it was pretty awesome. And for those of us that found this then, it's difficult to say it's over-rated now. It was a product of its time.
I love the Roses first album (I think the second one is good too) and still listen to it now.

As you say though it is a product of its time and if you were 'there' it means a huge amount, this is the reason it is rated so highly.

On a purely musical level it is probably the best example of an overrated album so far mentioned.
 


Stato

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Dec 21, 2011
7,836
Ii like to think I have at least one album I enjoy by most artists, but Dylan and Morrison do make it difficult for me.
If you were a teenager who grew up with access to 'An American Werewolf In London' on VHS, it wasn't at all difficult to enjoy Van's album 'Moondance'.
 


BadFish

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Oct 19, 2003
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Nothing they did from '67 onwards is "boy band". Helter skelter , I am the Walrus, Long and Winding Road, Nowhere Man, for example.
Much of the stuff they did before was innovative and musically interesting.

The boy band label is lazy and doesn't acknowledge the context of what they were doing at the time.

Given that they have been so highly rated by so many for so long though, they probably could be seen as overrated.
 








nickjhs

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Apr 9, 2017
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Ballarat, Australia
I think DSOTM is an interesting one.

It's my favourite album of all time and I think every second of it is a masterpiece which needs to be listened to as a whole.

But I also get how someone simply wouldn't get it. I don't think it's a "oh that's a nice tune in the background" album. I decide to sit down and fully engage in listening to it which is as twatty is it sounds but it's the truth. I won't choose one song from it, it has to be the whole thing.
Absolutely this. Some albums do not work while wandering around the house doing stuff. That's why I have two Hi-Fi setups. With one of them being setup up as well as I can (without being an audiophile twat) and I will get comfy with a glass of wine and the lights down and chill out letting the music wash over.
 






Raskolnikov

Active member
Aug 13, 2014
455
Wivenhoe
I‘m glad I‘ve not seen Metallica‘s Black Album mentioned. Growing up, and loving their earlier stuff, I always found it overrated and just a commercial cop out. These days I view it as a true masterpiece.

I think Unknown Pleasures is wildly overrated. Closer is phenomenal, Unknown Pleasures is cool but not thaaaat great
 










Jul 20, 2003
21,751
As to albums that stand out as dire in an artists catologue Bowies "Lets Dance"

I can only hope that you have never heard the two albums after "Let's Dance"..... Atrocious .... So bad that "Tin Machine" was an improvement ... And that was almost entirely crap.
 


Jul 20, 2003
21,751
"Rattle And Hum" by U2 was ridiculed when it came out. Regarded as a load of tripe.

All these years later if is now almost universally regarded as a f***ing awful record.


It's still overrated.
 




nickjhs

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Apr 9, 2017
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Ballarat, Australia
I can only hope that you have never heard the two albums after "Let's Dance"..... Atrocious .... So bad that "Tin Machine" was an improvement ... And that was almost entirely crap.
I heard snippets from both and avoided a full listen. Lets Dance was the start of the decline. Blackstar was a return to greatness
 


stewart12

Well-known member
Jan 16, 2019
2,223
I love the Beatles (in fact I'm buying lots of the McCartney/Wings solo stuff at the mo) but I've better really got Sgt Pepper and would never choose to play that.

Love the Stones too but Exile on Main Street is gubbins
For me Sgt Pepper would be relatively low down on my list of top Beatles albums... probably not even breaking the top 5. It starts and ends well but gets a bit boring in the middle. I prefer Revolver and Magical Mystery Tour which were either side of it
 


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