Best Hall & Oates Album

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.