Artists that never released a bad studio album

Unlike BAD to BAD2.

Never released an album, but hey!

And are these too new to evaluate? The Hold Steady. The New Pornographers. The Decemberists. I figure your question requires a minimum of three albums to qualify, but that's my purely arbitrary feeling.

;P

the stooges
the velvet underground (exluding post-lou reed years)
the beatles

"Strangeways Here We Come" is a strike against The Smiths.

REM? Get real.

i shouldn't comment, i'm not the biggest REM fan to begin with. did see them in concert though...

thirteen.

can they really all be good?

yep.

throwing muses

Is it supposed to be this easy?

definitely the sundays.

This thread is way too subjective... By what standards do you base an album on being "good" for this? Like Matt said about Merzbow, you can love everything, hate everything, or feel indifferent. Also, some artists' albums simply appeal to different fan sects. Take Neil Young for example, his work is incredibly disparate. Harvest vs Crazy Horse.

in terms of the pixies - sure, some of the tracks on trompe le monde don't have the wow effect earlier albums may have had, but the fact remains that those tracks weren't sell-outs - they weren't cheesy. maybe not the same kind of brilliance, but worthy of respect, nonetheless. in my mind, that constitutes good.

i think it's good to leave things to others' interpretation. if we had started out with an exact definition of good and bad, we wouldn't have had as much response. figuring out the parameters of what we're talking about is part of the dialogue process. in any event, threads like these should be fun, stimulating and open-ended - not pre-fixed.

i had no idea she and the 21st ceqntury didn't have an amicable relationship - in my mind, she is still the queen of clout.

tho i like that all my favorite artists have horrible rough patches.

not counting bands that have only been together for a few years, the only band i can think of that truly qualifies is galaxie 500.

1) bad=decidedly sub-par, not necessarily shitty

2) the artist had a substantial recording history--

the answer is probably no-one.

This is a difficult question because it's easy for me to stomach (and even convince yourself that you really like) a mediocre album from one of my favorite bands. I tend to give them the benefit of the doubt.

For example, I like Nirvana or Beck, but not so much that I'm going to pretend that Bleach or Guero/Stereopathic are good or not sub-par.

I'm sure there are Dave Matthews fans who are convinced that every thing he's ever done is gold... similar to Deadhead syndrome.

I think Fela and the Velvet Underground are the closest for me on this thread. Assuming Squeeze doesn't count.

I've gone right off Bjork so it's probably unfair of me to assess her albums.

Never thought much of The Red Shoes or Lionheart, I must admit.

I think of The Red Shoes as The Perfect Compendium For Kate Bush Newbies. it took my maturing(-of-sorts) to be able to care for it - too much ego-straining ("my hero musician always gets better, weirder, more exciting!") and too little life experience supplanted by imagination can't possibly abide by albums in the seeming "(s)he's gone Sting!" category.

you might notice I've just learnt how to make italics happen.

Red Shoes was in part about her break-up with Del Palmer. "Moments Of Pleasure" is a great song but Prince comes close to stealing the record with his cameo.

As long as the songs hold up....

third, Kate Bush's Lionheart is a good album, with decision-making intact, whether or not it is a bit rushed. The Red Shoes, on the other hand, well, i don't even know where to begin. I think The Red Shoes and I think '80s, cheesy, noisy production and lack of creativity.

Aerial - A Sky of Honey is BEAUUUUTIFUL. well, barring tracks 7 and 8. you just have to give it a bit of time. tracks 1-4 are very subtle - they require a patient ear. but when you've got it, it's really hard to forget.

someone has to back me on this Breeders thing....

second, it seems that you revel in proposing excessively challenging notions of intellect in the realm of the more ordinary.

ILM is pop. period.

Unfortunately, not. Avalon is simply boring and overproduced background music.

Mmm... both of them were a 7/10 album at least, though obviously not "that" good as the top releases were. But they were not bad.

New Pornographers - I've only heard two albums by then but I liked them both; are there more?

Yes, they have three. AC Newman also had a good solo record.

; )

10/10.

easy, hands down.

"Planet Of Sound" is alright, if a little contrived, but Trompe Le Monde is boring heard it all before stuff.

Meat Is Murder wasn't much cop either. I quite like the penultimate track where Johnny Marr rips off Spandau Ballet.

I agree that there is not enough truly bad music out there...

you must be joking! there's obviously an overabundance of truly bad music! 95% of everything is complete shite!

side note: at the risk of opening a can stuffed full o'worms, what's the problem with ROCKS? it's a perfectly valid verb, and evokes a highly desirable result. is there a similar problem with music that SIZZLES, POUNDS, SLINKS, CARESSES, THUNDERS, MEANDERS or CHARGES?

*ctrl-F's for "Smiths"* ye gods, never mind.

well i don't think you have to contract hives for something to be truly bad

jt, sexy back. infuriates me. "get your sexy on" makes me wanna throw up. that's physical enough for me.

also: Nectarine No. 9, four ace records...

and Ariel Pink is batting 1.000 so far...

speak for yourself, sir. or is that the royal 'we'?

I mean, when was the last time something you heard honestly and physically infuriated you?...not just to the point of speechlessness, but where you actually contracted hives?

about three minutes ago.. U2 came on the radio and I spilled my coffee in my haste to leave the sofa and turn it off. I still feel a bit sullied.

jt, sexy back. infuriates me. "get your sexy on" makes me wanna throw up. that's physical enough for me.

seconded. I'm not sure what he thinks he's doing, but whatever it is, he should just stop it. right now.

that's a big, bold statement coming from somebody who knows absolutely sod all about me or my inner workings. care to expound?

I hate these threads. they always start off with good intentions and then Beck fans start lobbing in the (Marcello otm) patchy-as-fuck 7/10 efforts as goodgreat albums and it goes downhill almost instantly.

agreed re: pixies vs. beck.

the beck thing's pre-empted (for the meantime)

i'm listening to Vespertine tonight.

I'm going to have to assume your opinion will change once you've experienced sex.

honestly, i'm kind of disturbed that i can't come up with more answers for this.

But I'm gay, we are having sex while listening Klaus Nomi.

i don't understand how some artists can put out one album, and then another that is TOTALLY different, in all the wrong ways

like tori amos - we got boys for pele, and now the beekeeper?

what's the deal?? how is it possible that the same woman who wrote "blood roses" could write "sleeps with butterflies"?

it really stumps me.

you know, i've been told i would like this klaus nomi. never got my hands on anything

Lullabies' virtues are different than those of e.g. Songs For The Deaf or Rated R, but it's still pretty great. Definitely not a bad studio album. QOTSA makes the list.

nope. i thought writing that would jog my brain. it didn't.

i keep wanting to say pink floyd but i don't know about the end, really. like the division bell kinda sucked. and what was the other one? the final cut? or was that a solo?

the More album, i've never heard, so i can't comment. and i never really count Ummagumma as a studio album, whether or not it's considered one.

but Atom Heart Mother, i can't say anything bad about. it's just an amazing thing. that and their next FIVE albums!

DOES WYNDHAM LEWIS MEAN NOTHING TO YOU?
-- Marcello Carlin (marcellocarli...), October 10th, 2006 8:25 AM. (later)

before all that other nonsense came down, i would said: ha ha OTM. also, "blessed rage for order."

to set varous records straight, it's meat is murder that disqualifies the smiths, not strangeways. elliott smith only really released one good album. squeeze notwithstanding, can VU's loaded really be said not to be a bad album, considering the massive drop-off from the other three albums? and the pixies are the same uninteresting college rock for white boys as the breeders.

anyway: tom waits.

only one good elliott smith record? that's a pretty harsh call. all the same, i hope you're referring to either/or

even if i were to grant you that it means anything as an observation, i wouldn't put the breeders in that category. maybe the pixies, just because of their signature surface sound. but the breeders have been too personal and engaging. yes, the pixies are more recognized. but that doesn't mean much.

the last splash album is probably what you're mainly referring to with that commentary. though it is a fantastic album, their first is miles more interesting. and their latest features moments so intimate, calling it college rock for white boys is like calling a ballet dancer a football player.

the end.

it's interesting, your apparent need to feel superior on these threads. you seem to enjoy undermining others - and going about it in a way so obtuse, your commentary hardly holds any meaning! i used to know someone like that, who would say odd things, you know, to challenge the status quo of ideas and how they are phrased. i don't think she ever realized that her big ideas mostly challenged her, not the other way around.

in any event, if it makes you feel smart, i suppose it's a positive thing.

jolly day to you!

*dnftt*

i don't know their albums, like at all.

i'm nowhere near as big a fan of basement jaxx as i used to be, but all the albums, particularly the first two, are excellent. i can't yet comment on the brand new one, however.

there are actually many, many bands who i don't think have released what you'd term as a 'bad' record. unless 'bad' simply means 'not particularly good'.

Why is college rock for white people only? Why is it that black people don't feel like listening to the same stuff? Is it because the performers are white?

Well, I was the one who mentioned Beck as fairly consistent until now. I know Beck is hated among the ones who wish he'd kept to hip-hop and never ever tried any other genre than hip-hop.

there are also many that get really, really cheesy at some point... it's weird, it seems to be a phenomenon. i guess there are a lot of acts with all "good" albums - maybe they started out from a place convenient enough to be simply "good." kind of like yo la tengo. like my boyfriend has said - of course their albums are "good." It's just such a functional formula.

but it seems that the bands who release the great records also release the worst ones. or is that too bold?

Here's a real challenge--find a country artist who never released a bad album.

if you strive to make music for long enough, you're gonna inevitably put out some shite

bob dylan, rolling stones, pink floyd etc.
that tom waits even comes into consideration as having released something bad needs to be viewed in the context of a long, illustrious, and constantly evolving career.

Stereolab and the Go-Betweens: not a bad album in the bunch...

now, I'll admit a ceratin apathy to the reunited G-B's records, but they're not *bad*...(we're not talking 10/10 here, but you wouldn't kick 'em out of bed for eating crackers, if you know what I mean)...and Stereolab may have issued some redundant compilations, but their studio LP's are all B/B+ at worst...(hey, better than this guy's academic record)...

I would also be willing to entertain Scritti Politti for this thread...(of course, Provision happens to be my favorite SP record...I doubt too many of you would second that)...

::shrugs::

but no, i'm not him!

Well, I'd be hard pressed to put "Let It Be" among a list of the worst albums ever. :)

Personally I'd like to mention Dodgy, although I know lots of people will disagree. :)

And "Let It Be" is hardly up there with the rest of The Beatles' output. But bad? Nope!

this is an important question. college rock or indie rock or used-to-be-punk-rock or whatever speaks predominantly from a straight white middle class male subject position. inevitably, then, it speaks directly to that very same subject position. this is not to say that there is nothing of interest to various Others in this music, but the enforced normativity of the white middle class singing-songwriting boy guitar rocker alienates its various Others by speaking from a (normalized) position that positions its Others as Others. speaking as a non-white person, i don't feel ben gibbard's pain. i don't feel black francis' pain. the "universal" human experience in their songs is not a true universal but, rather, a stereotype of the straight white middle class male experience. is this, as someone else said, a "tired critique"? it seems pretty relevant to me.

jessica hopper speaks to similar problems in emo with regard to femininity here.

and as applied to the Breeders, the critique seems to lump music with any connection to the world of white boy college rock under the same umbrella, which is unfair. the Breeders' line-up has been mainly female, and even though some of their music has received considerable college airplay, i wouldn't assign them such a label. their sound is far different from the likes of the Pixies, Built to Spill, Modest Mouse or any other band that could easily be lumped into that category. and their songwriting subscribes to no particular formula, white boy college rock or not.

the "universal" human experience in their songs is not a true universal but, rather, a stereotype of the straight white middle class male experience. is this, as someone else said, a "tired critique"?

Yes, at least in the sense that it's predicated on a big generalization.

it is also problematic - well, at least, the way Godfrzej put it earlier - because it implies that "college rock for white boys" is inherently uniteresting, which is silly. what often makes music uninteresting is a failure to depart from one sound or compositional style, a problem the pixies haven't had to the extent many acts have.

on the other hand, built to spill and the shins, for example, are more assailable. not because they could be classified as white boy college rock, but because they haven't seemed to as readily explore different sounds and styles of their genre, whatever it could be called.

when i think of yo la tengo, built to spill or modest mouse, i imagine a single building block that consists of a particular sound and melody. when i think of the pixies, i think of many different sounds and patterns because their music features more diverse songwriting. that is more interesting to me. but i do agree that quality draws from inspiration and ability to a great extent.

i think frank black has always challenged our expectations, whereas an album like the shins debut fed them. IMO, interesting music surprises you - with a scream, with bits of conversation, a shift in mood - and some artists do that better than others.

but, more importantly, i don't think i'm overgeneralising. i wasn't making a blanket statement about the class position of actual people in college rock/indie rock bands. i'm talking about the class positions that underlie genres of music. whether these people are actually working class or women or gay or not white often does nothing to change the fact that the meaning inherent in this kind of music, if made uncritically, reproduces the straight white middle class male subject position of, say, stephen malkmus. e.g. bob mould's gay, but why do many of us not know this? because his music doesn't call into question the heteronormativity of the male singer-songwriter. his songs speak to and from abstractions as opposed to to specific people and from the position of a specific person. solo bob mould, the shins, who would know the difference?

this is not to say that all guitar rock from the punk tradition made by boys alienates people of other subject positions. television personalities, galaxie 500, ted leo's first two records all undercut the stable subject position they speak from and, really, that attention to one's speaking position is all i'm calling for.

and usually, i find that if it takes too long to tell the songs on an album apart from each other, they bore me more than their idiosyncrasies engage me. stereolab is beautiful, but it functions mostly as Muzak for me. really incredible Muzak, but Muzak.

1. does b.b. king's music possess a stable subject position? in north america at least, isn't the only stable subject position the privileged straight white (probably also male) one?
2. does b.b. king's music alienate you the way the guitar rock/folk tradition alienates its Others? i.e. does b.b. king's music rely on the assumption that everyone understands the world as an african-american blues guitarist from the south?
3. do we have to feel a musician's pain to dig his/her music?

sorry, i just had to.

Is it? I have no idea, you're the one who brought up this "stable subject position" stuff.

2. does b.b. king's music alienate you the way the guitar rock/folk tradition alienates its Others?

I don't see how it does anything very differently from the rock/folk tradition. But no, it doesn't alienate me personally.

3. do we have to feel a musician's pain to dig his/her music?

That seemed to be what you were implying! But I don't think so, no.

i didn't mean to imply that you have to feel a musician's pain to dig the music, nor did i mean to say that you have to know the pain to feel it. my point was that a lot of contemporary guitar rock or singer-songwriter folk/pop/whatever screams to its listener "feel my pain." these musicians claim to speak for us and give voice to our feelings. the alienation i'm talking about lies in the listener saying to him/herself, "that's not my pain." i am reminded of the gay liberation movement slogan "how dare you assume i'm straight" or talulah gosh's song "i can't get no satisfaction, thank god."

or something... my song is going so well tonight!

This monkey's gone to heaven
This monkey's gone to heaven
This monkey's gone to heaven
This monkey's gone to heaven

The creature in the sky
Got sucked in a hole
Now there's a hole in the sky
And the ground's not cold
And if the ground's not cold
Everything is gonna burn
We'll all take turns
I'll get mine, too

This monkey's gone to heaven
This monkey's gone to heaven
This monkey's gone to heaven
This monkey's gone to heaven

Rock me, Joe!

If Man is 5...
If Man is 5
If Man is 5
Then the Devil is 6
Then the Devil is 6
Then the Devil is 6
And if the Devil is 6
Then God is 7
Then God is 7
Then God is 7

This monkey's gone to heaven"

Well, if you want to look at it that way, sure - certainly you're right about the assumption unless stated otherwise of straight white male-ness; but a singer who speaks in universalities makes me think of bad songwriting more than normative subject positions. I think people tend to write songs that way because songs like that have been successful in the past/they aren't particularly talented lyricists.

Within the context of "emo dudes are still jerks DO YOU SEE?" she has a point. But it's not exactly a groundbreaking revelation to point out that carraba-types who ask for pity (or punishment) for their bad behavior are self-absorbed cockfarmers.

Beyond that, it's pretty woeful. Accusation != critique.

In the USA that may not be the case too often (the American working class - in terms of level of education - tends to be either black or kind of stuck in a traditional white Christian fundamentalist/far right thinking), but in the UK, indie rock musicians are a lot more likely to come from a working class background. Which makes the generalization of college rock, or all "white" rock all over the place, to be even more weird coming from someone based in Britan like Marcello.

Geir, do you actually know anything at all about the UK?

Liars

Pavement

Spoon

tim, that sentence kind of ended before i got to the point. too many qualifiers, i guess. i was calling for attention to be paid to one's (dominant) speaking position when purporting to speak from a position of neutrality, generally about universal experiences. i.e. the everyman is a white guy, no?

i should clarify. it's not that many bands outrightly claim to speak for or to some universal human condition but, rather, that there is a curious double-bind inherent in most forms of artistic expression. on the one hand, you have the singularity of the artist, which is often not a "nobody knows my pain" but more a "no one can properly express this pain but me." (substitute "pain" variously with love/anger/any other kind of feeling.) even the "no one has ever felt this sad" claim is proleptic; it contains within it the desire for its audience to understand the pain, to share in the experience. therein lies the claim to the universal, that we can transcontextually share experiences ("that ella fitzgerald song totally expresses how i felt after my breakup") irregardless of class, race, gender, sexuality, time, space, etc.

wait i thought you were dissing the pixies??!

ramzi, i meant "monkey gone to heaven" as an example of a claim to a universal experience. so far as i know, there is no such thing as a universal experience. death maybe, but, having not died and having not spoken with anyone after they have died, i don't know.

I mean are you criticizing songwriters for not writing songs explicitly spelling out what position they're singing from?

no.

Are you suggesting that we can't? (With an appropriate discount for projection, of course.) Or that we can, but only as middle-class white men?

irregardless

Less theory, more vocab.

irregardless

Less theory, more vocab.

pwned?

but i'm suggesting that any experience we think we share with a pop song is an imaginary one. the problem with this, as i have said, is that this shared experience is too often grounded on a normative class position that is not actually normative. i.e. who can participate in this imaginary sharing of experience? who is excluded and, thus, interpellated as an Other by this?

also, kultur shock, dead kennedys, and, as far as I can tell, acid mothers temple. although they have released 900 albums, so there could be a few hundred duds out there I'm not aware of (ditto fushitsusha/keiji haino).

i agree with you. the gendering of guitar riffs as somehow essentially masculine is stupid. if dean wareham intended for his songs to do what they do for me, he'd agree with you too. but, stupid or not, i won't pretend that guitar riffs aren't coded as masculine. in the same way, it's stupid to gender the slowness of galaxie 500's riffs, the way they made loud distorted guitars sound soft and pretty, as feminine. but they are nonetheless coded as such. i can't speak to the simon reynolds book because i haven't read it, but what galaxie 500 does, i think, is precisely call into question the arbitrariness and stupidity of what you call "gender stereotypes," the conventionality of these assumption, as well as the subject positions that underlie these assumption.

another way of thinking about it might be jackson pollock's painting. is that kind of painting essentially masculine? of course not. it perhaps allegorises painting as an act of male dominance and virility, but how can any painterly practice be essentially masculine or feminine? but that doesn't mean that artists like shigeko kubota, nam june paik, duchamp, lichtenstein, and, to a degree, yves klein should have ignored the masculine coding of pollock's painting instead of problematizing the grounds of this encoding, exposing the stupidity instead of saying, "that's stupid. i'm above engaging with or even considering it."

I think Henry Cow is pushing it a bit too

There are a few Henry Cow duds, it must be admitted.

The Necks

Basically, all popular musicians with some level of popularity are all very wealthy, which, economically, puts them not only into the middle class, but as a matter of a fact into the upper class, and indeed makes them rather privileged. This goes regardless of race, social background, Nationality, gender, education or whatever, so I guess they should all write lyrics like that then?

The most important difference between a middle class or working class background will thus be more about culture than about economics, and I would say people like Damon Albarn, Green Gartside and Paddy McAlloon have all written lyrics that could not have been written by anyone who doesn't share their middle class background. I mean, imagine someone with a working class background namechecking Jacques Derrida or Balsaz in their lyrics. I think not!

Also note that skin colour doesn't necessarily matter here. Fro instance, Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy's middle class background comes through very obviously in their lyrics.

Shut up, you dick

SHUT THE FUCK UP *CLAP CLAP CLAP CLAP*
SHUT THE FUCK UP *CLAP CLAP CLAP CLAP*
SHUT THE FUCK UP *CLAP CLAP CLAP CLAP*

xp!

The Necks are a strong candidate--the only duds I've heard from them have been live. Haven't heard every studio album, though.

Another possibility is Cluster, but I can't remember if I've heard all their albums.

later!

katatonia

agalloch

isis [ep's and remixes don't count,do they?]

monolake

Really, we clearly not supposed to interpret Mick Jager as human being.

Of course, maybe that's the root of your problem with the music of the Pixies, since they come out of a punk tradition that sometimes rejected that kind of cartoon deification, self objectification. Frank Black does seem to be identifying as a person despite being a white guy.

Still he clearly engages with privilege in the song. The exaggerated white New York diction and accent at the beginning placing his identify, and later “I’ll get mine too” acts as a reference to being the kind of thing at the top of the food chain though at the same time the physical limitations of privilege, mortality/extinction. The pixies don’t assume that their own position in society is neutral/normative, rather they assert that despite their advantaged position in the matrix of domination they have as much access to universal human experience, so far as it exists, as anyone else.

Let’s also not pretend that the question of the humanity of whites isn’t on the table. Some of the cleverer of the punk and "collage" rock acts do defend their claim to humanity rather than surrendering it on a platter like say David Bowie.

Oh man, I just noticed that he specifically avoids saying the devil is six three times, but of course puts the notion in our heads by saying 5 and 7 three times. Cleverness is universal no?

• Califone
• The Clientele

Tones on Tail
Geraldine Fibbers
Opeth
Enslaved

Unwound

Daniel, how does the new Califone compare to Roots & Crowns?

Geraldine Fibbers 1 million% otm!

i would say

Mr. Bungle
Sleepytime Gorilla Museum

but, you know, of course i would

Only including artists with at least three studio albums:
Otis Redding
Possibly Sam & Dave, though I've never heard their reunion album from '76.
Mississippi John Hurt
The Coup
TLC
Kanye West
If we exclude posthumous releases (hell, even if we include most of them), then Jimi Hendrix
Again discounting posthumous releases, Bob Marley, though there's some early stuff I've never heard
Hound Dog Taylor
There's a lot by him I still haven't heard, but maybe Eric Dolphy
Clifford Brown
I've never heard his '90 comeback, but Allmusic likes it pretty well, so perhaps James Carr
I really want to say Al Green, but I've yet to venture into his gospel period
I also want to say Neu!, but apparently there's a studio album from the 90s that everyone agrees sucks
The Dictators
I missed his Christmas album, and a couple other recent releases, but I can't imagine a Bootsy Collins album that's not at least listenable
Nobody in the world agrees with me, but I think every studio album released by the Jam has its significant merits (even The Gift)
Ditto for Eric B. & Rakim (even Don't Sweat the Technique)
Ditto again for Rilo Kiley (especially Under the Blacklights, which is actually my favorite album from them)
the Police
the Undertones
the Feelies
the English Beat
the New York Dolls
the Auteurs
Maybe Ghostface Killah, but I haven't heard the new album yet
Maybe Grandaddy, though they released an album before Under the Western Freeway that I've never heard

i would say

Mr. Bungle
Sleepytime Gorilla Museum

but, you know, of course i would

― FCK R VWLS (jjjusten), Friday, October 9, 2009 4:36 AM

and you'd be 100% correct.

although SGM, bafflingly, did release one of the worst live albums of all time.

tempted to add melvins to this list. there are certainly less good albums (stoner witch, bootlicker), but no bad ones as such. ditto cardiacs.

Kyuss

Maybe Ghostface Killah, but I haven't heard the new album yet

The new one totally killed this possibility for me.

Slowdive