Remove one song from an almost perfect album to make it a perfect album

cuz it's so generic that anyone from Garth Brooks to Bryan Ferry can imprint a personality?

My pick:

remove "Come Around" from Kala

otm. "Paper Planes" would be the perfect closer.

"Wendell Gee" from Fables

Good-bye, Wendell Gee

Oh hai, can I not has "Leave Me Alone" off Power Corruption and Lies? Oh thanks, ta,

Nooooooo

can we not has Mark G on this thread?

move "We all stand" so that it ends the album and we're good.

Yep, like that one.

It's mainly because I got the cassette box thing in Oxfam, and I played it in the car.

The original cassette I bought back in the day had "Blue Monday" and "The Beach" ending each side, and that's also good.

Lady Grinning Soul from Aladdin Sane

Youd have to leave out a lot more to make that a perfect record imo

nope

(to both posts)

has no one else here thought the same about "we all stand"? i have nothing against it, it just feels awkwardly shoved in there between the faster tempo jams. and "leave me alone" really sounds like a penultimate song to me for some reason.. don't know why or how. swap "ultraviolence" with "your silent face" also, the latter is so powerful as a side-opener and the resulting first side becomes all uptempo etc.

Michael Jackson's Thriller - take out the ghastly "The Girl is Mine"

has no one else here thought the same about "we all stand"? i have nothing against it, it just feels awkwardly shoved in there between the faster tempo jams. and "leave me alone" really sounds like a penultimate song to me for some reason.. don't know why or how. swap "ultraviolence" with "your silent face" also, the latter is so powerful as a side-opener and the resulting first side becomes all uptempo etc.

When I discovered the album in high school, it was the most mysterious track -- it's a koan or poem set to music. That eerie synth flute playing along with the "Life goes on" eventually hooked me. I hear it as an experiment to which they never returned but is most welcome.

Pixies - Silver from Doolittle
Erasure - Sixty-five Thousand from The Innocents
My Morning Jacket - Into The Woods from Z
Haim - My Song 5 from Days Are Gone
Elastica - Indian Song from Elastica
Goldfrapp - Oompa Radar from Felt Mountain
The Divine Comedy - Freedom Road from Absent Friends
Charli XCX - Hanging Around from Sucker

love Oompa Radar and can't imagine Felt Mountain without it, best ever 60s film soundtrack pastiche

I always thought it was just a bit too silly and kind of ruined the mood of the album.

I guess I can see that - but the whole album is walking on a knife-edge of overly-mannered silliness, I think the fact that it just embraces it on Oompa Radar adds to the overall effect, also keeps things from getting boringly tasteful.

To make Aladdin Sane perfect
- Remove Let's Spend...
- Remove or go back in time and re-write/re-record "Panic in Detroit" (better vocals, and make the main riff not sound like some babyish preschool nursery)
- KEEP IN Lady Grinning Soul (seriously wtf?)

nursery rhyme*

You can make it an almost perfect 7" EP by putting Drive-In Saturday and Aladdin Sane on the A-side, The Jean Genie and Lady Grinning Soul on the B-side

it's got a great cover, but it's not a great album

Remove "Cat Food" from In The Wake of Poseidon.

"Time" and "Cracked Actor" (that guitar sound!) are actually my favorites off the album. I think maybe the mark of a great album is that everybody disagrees about what the best stuff is on it.
Anyway, it's maybe the first time glam really entered creep-out territory where the decadence is mean-spirited rather than kitschy (proto-Marilyn Manson, except not shitty), which is something "significant" in my book

Feel "Time" is kinda overwritten and never liked the chorus of "Cracked Actor" much, sorta clumsy lyrics? But yeah, nothing wrong with a divisive album

xxp I like Cat Food, but it is a bit of an outlier. Remove it and you'd basically be listening to In The Court part II

remove "Lyrical Gangbang"

almost wanna say remove "She's Bought A Hat Like Princess Marina" from Arthur but the album really doesn't work as well without it! Who'da thunk it

... also it's great.

See, what looks like filler is actually "light relief"

Remove "Hippy Boy" from The Gilded Palace of Sin. I've listened to that album around a hundred times; I've heard "Hippy Boy" maybe twice.

OTM removing "Lady with the Grinning Soul" would be criminal !
The only song I hate on Aladdin Sane is "let's spend the night". Awful.

Feel "Time" is kinda overwritten

What do you mean ? lyrically ?

Yeah, lyrics don't do much for me - a bit pretentious, lack humor, that wanking line always annoyed me - but mostly the composition and scope of the song always seemed to me - wrongly, perhaps - a failed attempt at repeating or outdoing what was so effortlessly achieved w Life on Mars

hum. OK. Well, his lyrics were often kinda pretentious and humorless in these days, weren't they ? (the whole Burroughs, cut-up approach...).
I like "Time" a lot although it's not a favourite. To me it's more a 20s cabaret/Kurt Weill hommage than a remake of Life on Mars.
It's darker and more decadent so the lyrics fit pretty well.

Yeah, I like the Brecht/Weill mood opening - but where's the storytelling?

Is Time meant to be a personification if so what's up with "Time – he flexes like a whore / Falls wanking to the floor" apart from empty provocation?

"We should be on by now" is a good line, also nice melodically, but the "La la" melody is Bowie trying to be awful clever as I hear it

But no more hating from me

While it does groove, i could do without...

"Hyperactive" from Thomas Dolby's The Flat Earth

This idea for the Flat Earth is really intriguing.

the recording or the theory? ;)

I wonder what of ppl listening to Paul McCartney's Tug of War bother with "Ebony and Ivory", and what % just turn it off at the end of "Dress Me Up As A Robber"? I'm not sure that Tug of War would quite make a *perfect* album even without "Ebony and Ivory", but I'd certainly put it in the category of "albums that are really good the whole way through and then have an incredibly bathetic final track"

Remove "Goin' Home" from Aftermath.

the theory. I re-listened to 'The Flat Earth' though and concluded that removing 'Hyperactive' would make it more internally consistent.

regarding "Ebony and Ivory" I've never hated that song (the melody is nice) but totally understand why people would hate it (the production, arrangements..., among other things !).
the demo version is pretty sweet. very simple. a kind of lullaby.

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

Tug Of War is a remarkably strong and overlooked album, but I'd be tempted to take off 'Ballroom Dancing' too. The other Wonder collab on that album is a slammer!

There are no perfect albums. They're all flawed in some way.

you're flawed in some way

As is everyone, including you. Well observed, by the way. Gold star.

But, y'know, to be fair, I've never once thought that XTC were an "'80s synthpop band", so clearly the ability to listen and comprehend what I'm hearing isn't one of those flaws.

I like the "Ebony and Ivory" demo as well, that version would have fitted nicely on McCartney II. I think the song would be a lot more tolerable as one of McCartney's non-specific "why can't we all get along" neurotically-anxious-under-the-surface lullabies, rather than awkwardly trying to make it "about" racism.

I always stop Help! before "Dizzy Miss Lizzy". Feels tacked on.