Major 'informal' albums

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

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

3 of the band being on smack probably contributed to that.

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

you're a tough taskmaster to say the least.

It’s why I can only think of a few genuine ones!

Then there's Dylan, who either has no such album, or at least three of them and maybe six or seven.

― Doctor Casino, Sunday, July 17, 2022 5:08 AM

soon as i saw this thread title i said out loud, "what? like new morning?"

Planet Waves may qualify, depending on whether you consider it major or not (it happens to be my favorite Dylan album)

Kate Bush, "50 Words for Snow".

"Aerial" was a huge event and rightly so but what next ...? Would she step away from the music business for another 12 years? And then a few years later she released a concept album about snow which was ... not what I was expecting?

I feel like if Westerberg wasn’t using an alias that Mono would be a good one.

untitled/unmastered

Maybe:

Carl and the Passions & Friends
Time Fades Away
Kojak Variety / All this useless beauty
Buhloone Mindstate
The Menace
Hindu Love Gods
Psb’s Release
Chaos and Disorder
More Fish

This is hard to define - I sort of think of them as albums that feel tossed off (even if they aren’t) and eclectic and deliberately “not major statements”. Then occasionally you get a record like Buhloone that’s one of their best things ever (imo)

Kojak Variety / All this useless beauty

Just about every Elvis Costello album post-Spike could fall into this category, honestly. The dude just shits out songs, and when he's got a dozen or so, bam! Album.

Smiley Smile, Wild Honey, 20/20, Love You

Presence
Tormato

i was with westbury on In Through The Out Door as Zep's (if they have one). but i guess there's no real reason artists can't have more than one of these? the only real limit is if they have too many of these for them to actually feel like exceptions to an otherwise more 'formal' series.

gbv 'do the collapse' (in reverse!)

Second the mention of the white album.
Every VU, to some extent (deliberately pushing out the walls of sensitive art pop perfection w "European Son," for openers, also the lurid Lou Reedisms, incl. laugh in "Heroin")(and the walls of sensitive art pop imperfection w the doo-wop-self-parody of "I Found A Reason," for closers (and the posthumous comps, VU and Another View, are also very much in this vein).
The Basement Tapes, incl. legit 2-LP, thinking esp. of "The Clothes Line Saga," "Get Your Rocks Off," "Apple Suckling Tree," "Odds and Ends," "Yazoo Street Scandal," plus the slippin' and slidin' of much of not all of the writin'--xgau:

..."serious" songs like "Tears of Rage" are all the richer for the company of his greatest novelties..."Going to Acapulco" is a dirge about having fun, "Don't Ya Tell Henry" is a ditty about separation from self...

Spoon - Transference

But if we are gonna hit it sideways a little more: The Great Lost Kinks Album, starting with its title, which incl. campy humor and seems to be snipped from clip art or a sales meeting proposal, and proceeds with items of varying value and interest, found on b-sides, soundtracks, in the can, the wastebasket, jewelry box, between sofa cushions: all kinda Kinks indeed, and I've always been happy to own it (never as a legit whole on any format other than LP, though that is still on the 'Tube, last I checked).

Presence isn't an "informal" album, it's a "half of us have suffered major life tragedies, can we even still do this shit?" album.

otm

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