Major 'informal' albums

Are we also trying to think of records that don't have a reputation as dramatic stylistic turns, like Led Zeppelin III?

Yeah I think so, they have to do it with less to lose. Esp as III came quite early in their career and the reaction to its stylistic change was so pronounced it annoyed Page who partly mystified the IV presentation in response. In Through the Out Door might be their best contender imo.

Popmatters did a good piece on artists taking stylistic detours. Not sure how many apply to the specific question:

http://www.popmatters.com/pm/features/series/445/

3 Springsteen albums mentioned and none of them are Nebraska?

David Bowie's Toy was intended this way--new versions of old songs recorded quickly with the current touring band.

Mmm link is dead here’s a list transcript on rym

https://rateyourmusic.com/list/funks/popmatters_presents_detours__the_strangest_albums_from_the_biggest_artists/

Finding one for Paul Simon is difficult, because he's known for stylistic detours, so which ones are "informal" and which are "serious"? Certainly his 1972 solo album is a lot looser and more relaxed than the Simon and Garfunkel records, but that impression might be overwhelmed by the fact that he was Going Solo.

Nebraska was Bruce’s first solo though

Floyd I'm not to sure about because all their earlier albums are, how shall we say, exploratory. Maybe their least psych/prog works fit the criteria best if only because what was/is seemingly least expected of them - in which case, yeah Ummagumma with its solo avant noodling (although I guess it being a double complicates matters), and almost half of both Atom Heart Mother and Meddle being folky and a bit novelty. Plus A Saurceful of Secrets is a mess and inevitably so what with the whole line-up change being captured as it happened (that's Black and Blue again).

Nebraska is the sort of album I'm avoiding - it's more McCartney than Wild Life.

Hearts and Bones is an interesting pick to me, since it's also a "somewhat disjointed remnants of a major project which then collapsed" kind of album, a la Smiley Smile. It began as an attempted Simon and Garfunkel reunion album (after the success of the Concert in the Park) which quickly broke down; Art was then purged from the tapes. The S&G version obviously would have been a huge deal, and the album still has a number of songs which are clearly very seriously worked-out major-statement pieces. But it's also eclectic to the point of feeling miscellaneous so I can understand it being placed in this category!

I suspect a lot of borderline cases would appear where the artist has like, half the material for a "statement" album, and then rounds it out with some other stuff that doesn't necessarily fit together, even if it's all good and enjoyable, fun to play, fun to stretch out in stylistically. Elton John's Don't Shoot Me, Caribou and Rock of the Westies all kinda fit here, to varying degrees.

Simon's best fit really might be There Goes Rhymin' Simon.

Now you come to mention it, the Beach Boys.

For Pink Floyd maybe Obscured by Clouds then?

With Meddle it’s evident they had already found their foot for what comes next and Obscured by Clouds feels a bit mor, like them on autopilot and doesn’t feel like it connects to Meddle or DSOTM

It being a soundtrack commission makes it easier for them to treat is as a nothing-to-lose kind of thing

Dylan has so many albums it's hard to decide which ones suit the idea best. Same with Neil Young but I was thinking maybe Hawks & Doves?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everybody%27s_Rockin%27#/media/File:Everybodysrockin.jpg

... "Everybody's Rockin'"

I realised I ruled in basically every Floyd album I could then, as soundtracks being soundtracks have that as a gimmick so they aren't major/regular releases.

I think A Saucerful of Secrets is the closest thing in spirit except for the fact they'd only been releasing music for a year by then. So maybe Atom Heart Mother - half major piece, half solo-oriented tracks which aren't so major.

Everybody's Rockin' has a novelty which is obvious right from the sleeve, it doesn't feel like its meant to be a 'regular' Neil album, such as they are. I think a big thing for me is it these albums look 'regular' from the outside and have typical promotion. The fact the albums are quite strange and a bit stuck together with sellotape has to be a bit incidental to how they are promoted imo.

lil wayne's rock album

or if that one doesn’t work, you can prob insert the entire history of rap mixtapes here

Not just for rap. Charli XCX's "Pop 2" was a "mixtape". (So was "Number 1 Angel" and while quality it's not as major)

Yeah maybe the 'feel' of a mixtape is quite central to what I'm going for here (although certainly not the promotion of mixtapes, which are by design not MSs, at least when done by big acts). And these albums don't have 'concepts' as such - the essential casual nature that makes them unique doesn't mean sustaining one singular theme (like one genre or one style of song) over a whole record, since that wouldn't be so casual.

Wilco Star Wars
Bonnie “Prince” Billy Sings Greatest Palace Music
Autechre Quaristice
Big Star Sister Lovers
Lennon / Ono Sometime in NYC
Sonic Youth Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star

Wasn't Springsteen's "Lucky Town" the informal cousin to "Human Touch"?

Wasn't Springsteen's "Lucky Town" the informal cousin to "Human Touch"?

It was, which is why it is probably disqualified (also tbh probably that it wouldn't fit anyway. I've not heard it in about 10 years but it probably isn't that deceptively strange a release really).

On the surface I don't see why Experimental Jet Set would suit any better than almost any other SY album - if anything it's probably one of their most straightforward albums - and yet I sort of feel it works in its way? Maybe it's because it's the relatively overlooked record from their 90s sequence?

I like Somewhere in NYC as analogous to Wild Life but imo its too much a MS - it's a double after all, has a lot of John's most MJ solo songs as well (no matter how terrible).

most MS* songs that should be lol

The Unplugged albums, but only for artists where it didn't seem "important" on the grounds of adding to their fanbase or seeming to shed new light on their talent/seriousness. Like, Clapton's and Nirvana's are part of their canon, but McCartney's is not, I don't think.

Or maybe the whole Unplugged format, by trying to bottle and reproduce what this thread is getting at, fails the test - formalized informality.

Ciccone Youth - The Whitey Album

Spent a while trying to think how Dylan comes closest. I mean it would be Self Portrait if it wasn't so long. Maybe it still is? It's a lot harder with singer-songwriter types I think. Maybe they can't quite loosen up in the way the category asks for.

Infidels has some sort of off the cuff quasi-maybe-reggae stuff and quite wonderfully for no real reason at all other than, as I understand it, him wanting to work with Sly & Robbie. But it probably falls down lyrically - people who know Dylan better will have to say whether many of the songs mark a noticeably low-pressure Dylan but I'm assuming not. I mean Jokerman is one of those reggae-ish songs and it isn't a Love Is Strange/Cherry Oh Baby/Don't Look Down.

The Police keep coming close but given their short existence probably not. Zenyatta Mondatta has a few fleshed out songs and then a lot of jams, quasi-instrumentals and what not, but maybe comes too early in their discography. Synchronicity is half commercial singles and half whatever-whichever experimenting and noodling, but it became their biggest album (really the latter is more like Combat Rock in that way, I think).

Soda Stereo’s Unplugged might just be their most definitive album

drake's more life was a "playlist", if you're reading this it's too late was a "mixtape," dark lane demo tapes were, uh, "demo tapes." his categorizations feel more like managing expectations for commercial performance than anything.

R.E.M.'s should be Up

Not NAIHF? Songs recorded in sound checks, playing around with electronics, etc.?

Miles Davis's Get Up With It: released while he was still active (before his 1975 hiatus) but culled from a bunch of disparate sessions between 1970 and 1974, with a different band on pretty much every track, and including some things that really did feel like scraps ("Rated X", "Red China Blues").

Not NAIHF? Songs recorded in sound checks, playing around with electronics, etc.?

True - the sound check thing can't be ignored (I think Up suits the electronics angle better though). But I feel that although it could be one, its more of a MS in practice - coming on the back of the $80mil contract (not that it started until Up though iirc), on the back of their first major tour since they became household names, the US 'failure' of it becoming a WSJ piece etc. I like the idea of it being a discrete 'informal' album in a MS's body.

With R.E.M. there's arguably a case that Green and Out of Time fit as well. Green because being all scattershot and doing a few straight up pop songs, a few mandolin songs, a few Documentish rockers - all mostly without real precedent in their discography - was their aim. Out of Time because they go even further with that - the funk/rap song, the (again) straight up pop song, the quasi-instrumental, the poetry track, drafting in a few friends whose names begin with K... definitely feels a lot more open-ended than Automatic or Monster (or Hi-Fi) - a strange record to become huge on.

To me, Up sounds like a band straining to prove they Can Still Be Creative.... NAIF feels like a band that doesn't give a Fuuuuuu

Also, Green and OOT are extremely deliberate albums… surely there has to be more to this than just a little playing around with a few new genres, otherwise you would’ve cited Some Girls instead of Black and Blue, no(?)

Good thread. This made me think of a passage from the Neil Young biography Shakey where the author recalls going to a record store in 1975 and seeing the just-released Zuma in the bins and thinking it was a bootleg because of the dashed-off looking artwork. But beyond the packaging I think Zuma also meets the criteria of "maybe quite jammy and open-ended, usually quite eclectic as their fancy takes them towards playing with other genres for the uncommitted sake of it". Not that it's full of genre "experiments" (it's musical ground he had covered before), but it's eclectic in the sense of having epic jams and countryish garage rockers alongside gentle folk tracks in the same mixed bag.

Also, Green and OOT are extremely deliberate albums… surely there has to be more to this than just a little playing around with a few new genres, otherwise you would’ve cited Some Girls instead of Black and Blue, no(?)

Well those are only arguable cases - although I think the particular playfulness of OOT in particular (I don't think it sounds particularly 'rehearsed', esp given the amorphousness of several tracks) moves it reasonably close. I'm convinced the only wholly genuine examples I can think of so far are the four at the top of the thread and Tonight. Everything else has at least something that stops it from being one completely. But it's definitely a nebulous concept - which suits a nebulous sort of album.

I really like the ad hoc-ish feel of Zuma and I'm not even a fan of his 70s work really. A friend points to the drums in Lookin' for a Love for being the precise harbinger of a certain 90s US indie drumming. The right sort of competence.

Guns N Roses - The Spaghetti Incident?

gorillaz have possibly released 2 'informal' albums : the fall, and, the now now.
damon recorded both albums on his ipad/laptop while on tour.

also, wah wah by james ?
seem to recall that this was regarded as bit of a one-off with it being put together from studio jams with eno etc.

The Spaghetti Incident? isn’t very major (and also westbury said it can’t be a covers album)

Wah Wah (great album) was a limited edition and the two Gorillaz ones were intentionally minor releases in the shadow of PB and Humanz (TNN was also a departure in that it was a Damon solo album in spirit).

weirdly i prefer the fall/the now now, to the full phat gorillaz albums.
the lack of excess guest list chaos helped make them more enjoyable for me.
so, are they regarded as 'informal releases or not ?

Stage Fright by The Band seems very informal/loose compared to their first 2 LPs.

The Who By Numbers, though there aren’t exactly a bunch of stylistic detours on it. But it was the first time they’d just thrown together a batch of songs and quickly recorded them since 1966, and it followed four MAJOR and HEAVY concept albums (two of them doubles).

so, are they regarded as ‘informal releases or not ?

They’re definitely informal releases, but not what I’m dubbing (because lack of imagination) major informal releases. I’m after that middle ground between works like those (and soundtracks, covers albums, side-projects etc) and MSs. An area of major albums that still have that informal feel - which plays out in their looseness and less formed nature etc

Who by Numbers! I see that
And Stage Fright although I haven’t heard it

Zooropa is a funny one because at the time it was definitely marketed as a major event where U2 would blow everyone's minds and take music to the future, and when it turned out to be a bit shit commercially and critically, the whole thing was retconned as "just a bit of an experiment, nothing too serious".

Yeah that's why it doesn't quite fit (while coming closer than many others). The marketing was relatively toned down - no actual singles in most countries, until Stay half a year later, the release of which was almost a separate thing altogether anyway - but it was attached to Zoo TV so inevitably it had MS written all over it. The loose marketing idea that Zooropa was their (or even rock's) big technological leap forward took care of itself at a time when others i.e. Billy Idol were huffing and puffing (and nowhere near as famous anyway).

I'm unfamiliar with the Mellencamp and Jackson Browne albums but this will give me an excuse to at least get clued up.

Queens of the Stone Age albums Era Vulgaris and Villains both feel like "we're trying out some new directions, here's what's in the workbook".

Years since I've heard either but I see that. The last Foos may fit alongside them as well.

Neil Young's Tonight's The Night fits in with this, as an album not released until a few years after its recording, loose, jammy, seemingly for themselves as much as anything. Even Zooropa has that bit of an air of "one for us" after a "one for them" blockbuster.

Although I'd say Neil's tactic from 1973 on was making informal albums into major statements.

Although the record was a success, in the years following its release, the group have regarded it with mixed feelings and rarely play its material in live performances. Bono said, "I thought of Zooropa at the time as a work of genius. I really thought our pop discipline was matching our experimentation and this was our Sgt. Pepper. I was a little wrong about that. The truth is our pop disciplines were letting us down. We didn't create hits. We didn't quite deliver the songs. And what would Sgt. Pepper be without the pop songs?"[111] The Edge said that he did not think the songs were "potent", further stating, "I never thought of Zooropa as anything more than an interlude... but a great one, as interludes go. By far our most interesting."[18] Clayton said, "It's an odd record and a favourite of mine."[35]

U2 as always misunderstanding where their true strengths lie. iirc the record was largely acclaimed at least stateside, I also remember it not being regarded as the massive next step into future sounds (that would be how Pop was unleashed) but maybe the single example of U2 talking about in upcoming work as just a bit of fun, a bonus, a coda, etc.

They (often wrongly) get cold feet about every album of theirs that doesn't take off towards true populist heights. R&H and Pop ofc have bits that read like that on their wikis but (perhaps surprisingly) the most major of all is for No Line on the Horizon.

also yeah Zooropa I think is always regarded as a 7 or 8/10 album critically. I don't think that's ever really changed in the years since.

really? i feel like it's gone up in estimation. when i was first getting into u2 (in the years between all that you can't and how to dismantle), the general sentiment seemed to be "avoid zooropa and pop."

Low "cmon" feels like one of these to me

Our local alt-weekly gave Zooropa a 1/5 with a comment like "coke-addled rock stars phone in their latest from the back seat of their limousines".

It was mentioned (albeit slightly qualified) upthread but Caribou really isn't far off the sort of thing I mean. It's probably more Elton's Goats Head Soup than Black and Blue in truth but still, it's a quickie, largely fun LP from near the top of the mountain that tentatively dips its toes into cabaret, funk, country and continental waters while holding on to a smattering of actual set-pieces (most notably DLTSGDOM).

Elton is a funny one for this because so many of his classic-period albums are similar grab-bags of genre/sonic exercises, and AFAIK all of them were cranked out in ludicrously short time frames. One of those artists where the 'major statement' versus 'major informal' line might really just be drawn by marketing, chart success, and critical reception. Caribou FEELS more like "major informal" than Captain Fantastic, Don't Shoot Me..., or either disc of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, but is that just because those records are better and more celebrated?

that album Nas did with Damian Marley

An informal album wouldn't start with "Funeral for a Friend" or end with "Curtains", though; there's definitely a feeling of (somewhat campy) high seriousness in the presentation. "Ticking" was apparently meant to be a big statement but it seems to be totally forgotten, maybe because the album is dismissed and it was never a single.

I feel like every rap album after like 2008 is informal

some exceptions aside of course

Yeah, I sometimes think that Carter III was like the last traditional formal rap album

Not that they were major rock artists at the time (and probably still aren't) but Darklands felt pretty informal after the pretty major statement of Psychocandy.

has no one yet mentioned the first Traveling Wilburys album?

Seems to violate the "it can't be a side project" rule

There's a Riot Goin' On seems like an LP that is both musically informal and a major statement, as opposed to Fresh, and pretty much everything that came after it, which is/are mainly informal.

One of those artists where the 'major statement' versus 'major informal' line might really just be drawn by marketing, chart success, and critical reception. Caribou FEELS more like "major informal" than Captain Fantastic, Don't Shoot Me..., or either disc of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, but is that just because those records are better and more celebrated?

Yeah this is the odd line Elton walks. But I'd say Caribou definitely is a bit more MI than at least two of those (as Brick Road is a double and Cap Fantastic a concept record). Whereas Piano Player feels about as regular an imperial Elton album as there is (at least to me), next to which Caribou feels a bit more loose and ad-hoc (even more diverse without it being known as his "eclectic" album, + slightly arbitrary album cover and title (just naming it after the studio).)

what about Tin Machine?

this also makes me think of Taylor Swift's Evermore, but "surprise" is not the same as the informal vibe here and there was by definition zero promo

xp Tonight is definitely Bowie's imo. Tin Machine was both a side-project and a Major Statement/self-revision (which in itself is unlikely combination).

Kendrick - untitled unmastered