What are those albums that are so off-course even the hardcore fans needn't bother

Robert Miles - Organik

gone are the cheese filled dance/trance/pop anthems, in comes Nitin Sawhney/Bill Laswell/downtempo cinematic excess, and very few beats.
needless to say, its the only album of his i have ever been interested in listening to.

was thinking about "Funhouse" for this thread earlier. think it probably counts.

plz allow me to register my vehement disagreement over Satanic Majesty's Request being considered here

― sleeve, Thursday, September 12, 2019 10:41 AM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

seconded

Kreator's "Endorama"

A couple of those Felt albums that Lawrence did nothing but contribute titles.

VU’s Squeeze is way worse than I expected. The opening track is horrifying.

would Elton John's Victim of Love count? even among "pop-rock artist goes disco" moves, i feel like it stands out for total commitment to the bit and total musical mediocrity such that you could be a "hardcore" fan and still not need to hear it, and get nothing out of it if you did.

REM's Around the Sun also might squeak in here? dunno how wild of a sonic departure it has to be to be "off-course."

maybe Paul Simon's Capeman? sort of in the Joel/McCartney classical-album zone maybe...

tbf there i might be reacting to the rarity of albums so offcourse that even hardcore fans needn't bother, by trying to fudge it into "albums that pretty-big fans quickly learn aren't essential," which is a different animal

That Liz Phair album is called Funstyle, you guys

ATS is completely unnecessary.

I agree with Victim of Love, it's wretched. Total stylistic shift (and not a good one) with songs he neither wrote nor played piano on.

I'm sure i'd get pushback from prince nerds here but most of the madhouse stuff is entirely unnecessary.

Prince’s N.E.W.S.

yeah his jazz fusion records all work here i think

i will say that i think his ballet has some worth!

Haha, i immediately saw that I called it Funhouse and not Funstyle. Wish ILX had an edit option. I'll double down though and say Stooges "Funhouse."

There's dismissal of Lindstrom's Six Cups of Rebel, but I love it, and hear it staying the course with his kraut/italio stuff, towards 80s Eno/Conny Plank productions. But his collab with Todd Rundgren just doesn't work at all, drives into a ditch.

Robert Miles - Organik

gone are the cheese filled dance/trance/pop anthems, in comes Nitin Sawhney/Bill Laswell/downtempo cinematic excess, and very few beats.
needless to say, its the only album of his i have ever been interested in listening to.

― mark e

His Miles-Gurtu album with jazz drummer Trilok Gurtu is excellent, and he did a psych/prog record with Robert Fripp too.

Keith Jarrett, 'Restoration Ruin'

haha someone gave me that album as a gift once. It's terrible. and definitely what this thread is about

Jarrett got the idea to make a one-man-band record by reading about how Pete Townshend recorded his demos. Prior to recording it, he tried to contact Pete for advice on how to approach the project; Pete refused to speak with him (but later admitted to being a big fan).

Wow, good story!

idk if Townsend would have been helpful, the album's problems are not technical in nature, it's that the songs suck

And as for his voice...

I have tried and tried with The Age of Adz but for me it belongs in this list.

Echo & The Bunnymen recording an entire album sans McCulloch? This happened, amazingly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ldwwRldTS8

Kylie's "indie" album Impossible Princess has been pretty much been scrubbed off her discography, which I think now goes "Confide In Me" --> Unusually long break --> "Can't Get You Out Of My Head"

James Dean Bradfield & Nicky Wire co-wrote the single IIRC

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBSg4_WStsU

His Miles-Gurtu album with jazz drummer Trilok Gurtu is excellent, and he did a psych/prog record with Robert Fripp too.
― Siegbran,

well i never.
had no idea re such things.
added to my list should i ever chance upon them round these parts (highly unlikely, but still)

xpost : i love the indie album by kylie.
release timing was f*cked due to the death of the death of diana.

Depends on how 'hardcore fan' is defined, but a lot of hardcore Who fans don't bother with 'Endless Wire', any of individual solo albums, or even 'It's Hard' or 'By Numbers'.

Zappa can't he can only be failed by the listener

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown)

zappa failed, by his own standards, on december 4, 1993, and any time people have spent listening to his music since then has been time wasted

The two Supertramp albums before Crime of the Century

Joe Jackson has done so many one-offs that even the hardcoriest fan can find something to hate.

Liz Phair's "Funstyle" has some fun stuff on it

"Train Above The City" is pure garbage but I actually really like "Let The Snakes...", as its own thing. I was extremely disappointed when I found it and paid full-price for it. It should be EP priced.

Brian Eno's "The Drop" is my pick, here

Also "The Beekeeper" is so bad that I'd pick it, too; "Y Kant Tori Read" is weird and awful at times but is a far more compelling album

Ctrl+F "The Red Shoes" *no results* thank God I'm sick of that album getting the hate it doesn't deserve it is really wonderful, but "Lionheart" is not even fans-only as far as I'm concerned

I like the first three Kraftwerk albums fine but find the first two Popol Vuh albums unlistenably bad-- including "In Den Garten Pharaohs" which I know a lot of people rate highly-- I'm sure that people only like that album to be oblique

"Soon Over Babaluma" has "Come Sta, La Luna" which is one of Can's best songs

there are a fair few Sufjan albums that fit this well enough but The Age of Adz is absolutely not one of them, despite being a left-turn, and is his best work. Enjoy Your Rabbit fits in every way except it dates back to before his breakthrough with Michigan, but it's roundly ignored in his discography for more reasons than that, being an instrumental electronic album that bears no resemblance to the rest of his work and isn't that good. there's also The BQE, which is also very ignored as it's the instrumental score to a film he made. it's not as much of a departure as Enjoy Your Rabbit is and the combination of electronics and orchestration did signal the direction he went in with Age of Adz, but it still doesn't really resemble his song-based work that much.

Scrolling through this:

https://the-niche.blog/2018/10/23/all-293-sufjan-stevens-songs-ranked/

It's pretty clear that 75% or more of Sufjan's released material is inessential-- this is not a comment on his capabilities as a creator but a comment on the volume of his released material. (One of my favourite Sufjan songs is "In The Words Of The Governor", a weird track he recorded for The Believer and he is rambling like a gay Mark E Smith and I enjoy to see it, it's a pretty perfect song)

Anyway what is great about BQE is its economy and concision and so I like it. He's not the best composer but he's capable and he worked hard and it is an excellent piece and I listen to it once a year, probably. I like a lot of Adz, too, "I Want To Be Well" is a legitimately terrific song. With Sufjan though (as far as I'm concerned) he's been a "one song on an album" kind of artist ("Flint", "Dress", "Wasp") until "Carrie And Lowell" which just flattened the American Songbook so it's kind of impossible to really understand or parse what is even going on with him

I like the first three Kraftwerk albums fine but find the first two Popol Vuh albums unlistenably bad-- including "In Den Garten Pharaohs" which I know a lot of people rate highly-- I'm sure that people only like that album to be oblique

Are you serious?

Extremely! It's a marvellously terrible record!! And I love all the stuff that comes next

No, I meant about people only liking it to be 'oblique'.

My least favourite record of all time is The Goslings "The Grandeur Of Hair". Songs that a songwriter could write in less time it took to perform them; run the mix through a Big Muff. I love rigor but I cannot abide laziness. "In Den Garten Pharaohs" is a collection of the most poorly formed noodles I can imagine. God. I am listening to "The Grandeur Of Hair" right now just to remind myself. Wow. It is the worst. This is Bruckner, except from Alabama. Or Florida? Let's go with Florida.

And yeah, "liking things just to be oblique" it is a thing. Have you heard of a band called Royal Trux? They are terrible. I adore them. Sometimes I shit sesame seeds and I find them on my ass and I eat them in the shower. I macerate these digested sesame seeds in my front teeth and I think "this tastes like Twin Infinitives sounds" and I enjoy it, similarly.

Uh, OK...

xps yeah it's not really surprising that most of Sufjan's output is inessential when a significant portion of it on a song-by-song basis includes his Christmas boxsets, outtakes collections, and other diversions such as The BQE and Planetarium. i think the core of his discography from Michigan onward has a solid enough through-line though, with some of those diversions helping to fill in the gaps a little, and he's only improved with time really as Adz and C&L are near-perfect to me.

Interesting! I have to revisit Adz, clearly. The heaps of praise pushed on "Impossible Soul" frustrated me around that record when "I Want To Be Well" was such an underremarked achievement

Kylie's "indie" album Impossible Princess has been pretty much been scrubbed off her discography, which I think now goes "Confide In Me" --> Unusually long break --> "Can't Get You Out Of My Head"

James Dean Bradfield & Nicky Wire co-wrote the single IIRC

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBSg4_WStsU

― Brainless Addlepated Timid Muddleheaded Awful No-Account (Pheeel), Thursday, 12 September 2019 20:32 (yesterday) link

I don't know if this is true elsewhere but it's definitely not true in Australia:

- firstly because songs like "Did It Again" and "Breathe" did pretty well as singles and she still plays them.

- secondly because MSP only played on two tracks and the balance of the album was more in a Sneaker Pimps first album vein.

- thirdly because the above mixture of styles basically anticipated Natalie Imbruglia's debut album about a month later and it didn't feel "off course" at the time even if kylie subsequently opted for course correction (my theory on this: because Impossible Princess under-performed commercially, the subsequent 'Intimate and Live' tour leaned quite strongly into kylie's most reliable audience sub-component, being her gay fans; her subsequent recognition that they form her base has since shaped all her subsequent aesthetic choices).

- fourthly because outside of the UK (where the critical reception was predominantly "lol, kylie is not shifting units anymore, sux to be u") the critical reaction to the album was mostly positive.

- fourthly because the album in between impossible princess and "can't get you out of my head" (2000's light years) was massively successful here, going four times platinum. Although the following album Fever is a big improvement on the same basic idea.

- fifthly and most importantly, because Impossible Princess is precisely the kind of album that trv kvlt fans like to say is their favourite (and indeed this tends to be the default stance adopted by kylie stans). It's more akin to, say, Smashing Pumpkins Adore in that regard.

What I think is interesting about the album is that kylie has said she will avoid making an album like it again (basically, an album so personal) because she was too hurt by the gleeful savaging it met in the UK. An interesting separate thread would be listing albums that the artists have said they can never repeat because to do so would be too painful (for whatever reason) (as opposed to because it was bad or a mistake).

Great post Tim

Can somebody confirm or deny that Big Star's "In Space" belongs in this thread, I've never listened to it, I can't bear to, I love that band so much and can't deal with a sad ending.

I feel like i'd maybe save Lionheart just for "In Search of Peter Pan" but given I haven't listened to the album in more than 20 years I really can't complain about its inclusion here.

xps "Impossible Soul" is tremendous and i love it but "I Want to Be Well" is possibly my favourite song he's ever done

is Impossible Princess really the trv kvlt Kylie stan album these days? i thought it was a fan-favourite, sure but i thought it was more of the old-school rockist's pick for her best because she wrote her own songs! and worked with MSP! or at least that's how i've seen it advocated for lol

Tim I guess we would include Blood on the Tracks in that list - "A lot of people tell me they enjoy that album. It’s hard for me to relate to that. I mean, you know, people enjoying that kind of pain?" He sure never went there again.

As a byproduct of their intense identification with and/or fetishism of the artist-qua-artist, pop stans tend to hold a lot of values we might otherwise associate with rockism: an emphasis on how personally meaningful or deeply felt the artistic product is, whether it is "brave" or "bold" or autobiographical. In particular, they tend to be attracted to the fetishism of "difficult" works that only the fans can truly understand.

With Madonna, for example, this manifests not just in a lot of consensus-conforming stanning for Like A Prayer and Ray of Light, but also contra-stanning for Erotica and (perhaps more surprisingly) American Life.

But it's fair to say that the pop stan appreciation of Impossible Princess is definitely not premised on her working with the Manic Street Preachers (I'd actually be surprised if there were many people at all who held that position: "Where The Wild Roses Grow" seems like the more obvious candidate for kylie-but-credible).

xpost - yeah that's a good one. I feel like i've read Robert Smith say similar things about Pornography, although that may be more "you're only that young and self-absorbed once".