Best Hall & Oates Album

I listened to H2O again and it's definitely great. The production is fantastic. The outros/fades on One on One and Open All Night are just gorgeous. On my stereo the "leave me alone" backing vocals on Family Man just jump out at you.

I still prefer Voices, which probably means I lean power pop over R&B. Delayed Reaction was my favorite H2O discovery, which seems the song most similar to Voices.

Ok, I kind of love Italian Girls now, but they missed an opportunity to have the chorus backing vocals sing the names of pastas instead of the female Italian names.

Fusilli . . . Bucatini . . . capellini . . . fettuccini . . .

War Babies is kind of fantastic, imho - the guys getting totally lost in some really interesting alternate directions for them. most of side A is charming, in the way of something that could be read as a parade of failures but i have a smile on my face through it anyway. a series of reaches for things they can't quite nail, like long proggy instrumental passages or full-on Stevie Wonder attempts. and then you get to "War Baby Son of Zorro" and it's like oh MAN do i wish they had an whole ALBUM of spaced out, Rundgren-flavored art-rock-pop! "Better Watch Your Back" is really great too, fun wacky groove (with vague Robert Palmer qualities?) and a super cool chorus that feels like it's just missing something to make it take off into the stratosphere and it could have been a hit. surprised that Google doesn't turn up any famous songs that sampled it.

omg how did i never notice the wild epic of "Screaming Through December" with its "'QUASAR, QUASAR,' WERE THE FIRST WORDS I HEARD FROM FAUSTUS" spoken-word section and "record slowing down" conclusion?! i mean it's not really a good version of this kind of thing, i think (?) but it's so fun to hear them trying their hardest and swinging for the fences.

i don't know anything too much about Utopia or Rundgren beyond a couple of singles i really like (like "Love of the Common Man"). do his fans think of this album as part of his story/oeuvre? like is it thought of as a curio for deep-cut fans, or is it thought of as a core Rundgren album, albeit one with two different vocalists/songwriters? or what?

It’s a great album but it suffers from Rundgren’s (and I fucking love Rundgren) ultra compressed everything turned up to 11 production…I wish he’d spend a bit more time on the sonics on his records…(Prince syndrome too)

i can hear that, totally. i feel like its biggest shortcoming for me is that either the band hasn't quite gotten "there" yet, or they just didn't completely mesh with H&O, or needed more time to play around with the songs, or something. like maybe the drummer in particular isn't lifting things up or taking them to that next step...?

but i'm no musician and definitely no drummer, so i always feel like i might be TOTALLY mishearing what's happening when i say things like that.

anyway though is "WBSoZ" gonna become one of my favorite Hall & Oates songs? i've already moved the needle back to play it twice.

He's a
Scared baby
He's afraid of a plane!
Hid under his desk in a hundred air raids
SCARED BABY!
Dug in the dirt, watched Wyatt Earp,
In the Atom Age, Atom Age, Atom AGE SCARED BABY!

"Better Watch Your Back" definitely could have been a hit for some funk act that was on fire in 1974.

thank you all for joining me in my liveblog of the evening i discovered i really dig Side B of the Hall & Oates album War Babies (1974)

Yeah, War Babies is the best!!! <3

nooo the production is awesome

The album was voted #4 in our Rundgren production poll, over Bat Out of Hell, so I guess it is generally esteemed. I feel that parts of it almost attempt a cloning of his own records, and if this has roused your interest, you should definitely check out A Wizard, A True Star and Todd.

oh for sure, it’s of a piece with Wizard and Todd

He produced this Felix Cavaliers in 1974 and it sounds less fugged up:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3zJAcYuqic

"Hall & Oates" is a fiction. None of these albums say "Hall & Oates" on them, it's Daryl Hall & John Oates, or simply Daryl Hall John Oates. That said, I have no opinion on which is best, you guys are probably correct about that.

thanks for the Rundgren album recs, will check out!

You may find "Number One Lowest Common Denominator" a better version of what they tried in "Screaming Through December".

Interested to hear your thoughts on A Wizard…, dc

According to Daryl, War Babies got them dropped from their label because it was too indulgent.

plausible! they'd also released three albums to very limited success... five singles, with only one even charting, at #60 on the Hot 100 (the original issue of "She's Gone"). they probably seemed like a bad investment that it was time to bail on!

have spent some time with A Wizard..., enough to put it on my vinyl wantlist! Thanks for the rec. It definitely clarifies what the Rundgren/Utopia side of things is contributing to War Babies. I think for my tastes, the parts of WB that work are slightly more my jam... I like the idea of H&O's interests providing a consistent set of ingredients for the wacky art-rock stuff to play off of. Makes me wish they'd done an album with mid-70s Eno. But it's clearer now that the stuff that doesn't work is more due to either weaknesses in the material or a failure to mesh with the TR crew, than any inherent weaknesses on the latter's part. Also I have "just another onion heeeaad" stuck in my head all the time now.

not sure i ever actually scrolled up and looked at the poll results on this thread. some really unusual votes there! didn't even know they *had* those 90s and 00s albums.

Glad you like Wizard! So are you saying you'd rather have heard how Rundgren would've produced a "She's Gone"-type song, instead of Daryl trying to out-weird Todd with bizarre material?

Hmmm. I mean, I love the title track so much, and that's definitely in the "out-weird" zone (or was it more Rundgren encouraging them to embrace their weirder ideas?). But in terms of missed potential I look more to like, "Better Watch Your Back" which is a more conventional kind of H&O song that has this more post-psych art-rock sound to it. Idk. I think I'm really just hearing a lot of the songs as almost-great but a little clunky, and imagining they just needed a few more weeks rehearsing together with the band and getting a feel for the songs all together, finding what they wanted to be.