Unique, special albums not yet widely considered GOAT

All genres and eras. Some examples:

Associates - Sulk
Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band
The Who - The Who Sell Out
Black Box Recorder - The Facts of Life
Stairsteps - 2nd Resurrection
Junior Boys - Last Exit
ScHoolboy Q - Blank Face LP
The Afghan Whigs - 1965
Marshall Crenshaw - Field Day
Diddy - Last Train to Paris
Ashford & Simpson - So So Satisfied
Drive Like Jehu - Yank Crime
Against Me! - Transgender Dysphoria Blues
The Stylistics
Cut Copy - In Ghost Colours
Thin Lizzy - Night Life
Kehlani - SweetSexySavage
M People - Elegant Slumming
Maxwell - Embrya

https://www.dansendeberen.be/wp-content/uploads/goede-scaled.jpg

Not quite sure about the GOAT part, but Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band *is* widely considered great. Certainly the original band never topped the debut, and as much as I love Kid Creole records, I feel like they're a different thing.

Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band
Thin Lizzy - Night Life
Maxwell - Embrya

i like you, g simmel. you're cool. we should hang out.

of course, my contribution is every david axelrod album.

HTRK - Psychic 9-5 Club
Palace Music - Arise Therefore

Swirlies - They Spent Their Wild Youthful Days In The Glittering World Of The Salons

Lilys - Eccsame The Photon Band

New wave edition:
Altered Images - Pinky Blue
The Bongos - Drums Along the Hudson
Squeeze - Argybargy
INXS - Shahbooh Shoobah
The Passions - Thirty Thousand Feet Over China

carl crack - black art
kwjaz - (self-titled)

good call on the HTRK, Matthew!

Squeeze - Argybargy

man i heard "pulling mussels from the shell" in the store yesterday and hot damn, what a song!

black ARK ffs

(Xpost to me)

Is this just a list of albums we like

Hey now I tried to point out two that are super unique and that I’ve always been butthurt for not having been accepted by the nerdy hipster rock loving masses as “pioneering”. I’m trying to play the game here.

i think lilys are quite possibly one of the most underrated bands of alltime, fwiw evan

Is this just a list of albums we like

you can make an argument for special/unique/cool but i wouldn't push obscure too hard

i'll push whatever i want, MOOKIE!!!

have you tried drugs, btw?

i'm 'trying' them right now!

I mean, obscure is more interesting to me than whatever “not yet widely considered GOAT” is but I’m glad to hear that sulk is still well liked

i think lilys are quite possibly one of the most underrated bands of alltime, fwiw evan

― Totally different head. Totally. (Austin), Wednesday, May 5, 2021 9:21 PM (fifty-two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Hey true, but that album is somethin else on its own too!

so this thread is just "albums I like a lot that are not absolutely canonized"?

Malignancy, Intrauterine Cannibalism

I gotta go with Inhuman Grotesqueries, but it’s always the one you hear first that you fall in love with, right?

haha nice

Squeeze - Argybargy

Certainly power pop fans know this is a GOAT, the one that's criminally unheard is Play. More "mature," less poppy than usual (but check "Crying in My Sleep"), the songs are among the best they've ever written and Tilbrook sings the hell out them. It's one of those albums that took a while to sink in, but when it did, I had a new favorite song every two weeks for months on end.

It's the only record they recorded for Reprise--everything they recorded before and after were A&M--and I suspect it didn't get enough push from the label. It didn't help that my least favorite song ("Satisfied") is Track 1 and was the first single!

Crying in My Sleep
Letting Go
Sunday Street
Walk a Straight Line

I'm convinced that dog's second album Totally Crushed Out is some kind of masterpiece

probably low on the list but 1965 as the afghan whigs selection is absurd

I think this thread would be more interesting if framed as "albums you predict will become canonical within the next [X - 10?] years but aren't there yet".

I feel like it's actually pretty rare for this to happen unless the album was literally "lost" and/or where the album is swept up in a revival/recontextualisation of broader sound or sensibility.

The Blue Nile's Hats is a good example of an album whose stock has gone up massively in the last 15 years (I mentioned Blue Nile on this thread: Which artists legacies have improved/worsened during the 2010s?). Same with Fleetwood Mac's Tango in the Night. Same with Sade generally. Not hard to discern a common thread amongst those examples!

I like Tim's framing. Following that (and I think fitting thematically with his examples):

Above & Beyond Presents OceanLab - Sirens Of The Sea

Basically I want listening recommendations and the three criteria are a) unique albums in the sense that they are not what you would expect them to be, b) not necessarily obscure, just unknown enough that there is a chance I haven't heard them, c) albums you feel are among the best ever, so not just every intriguing oddity.

Very happy with the results so far!

The two I know from your original list are Sulk and Sell Out, in what sense are they not what one would expect them to be?

jane siberry - the walking

i'm gonna throw another jazz pick out there:

grant green - street of dreams (1964)

rationale: grant cut so many all standards albums for blue note in the mid 60s that it's easy for them to all kind of bleed together. but dig this: the lineup is a quartet that includes larry young on organ, bobby hutcherson on vibes, elvin mother flippin jones on drums, and grant on guitar of course - very unconventional! they play all standards, but it's just four long tunes that they take at a very rolling and rollicking steady pace and grant is allowed to really stretch out and have these amazing conversations with bobby hutcherson. elvin jones is in top gear the entire time and the grooves that he gets into with larry young just feel like water smoothly and neatly running along. on some days i'd say it's the best record grant ever made as a leader - it's definitely my personal favorite.

Tim’s spin on the thread topic is exactly what happened to the band Duster. Stratosphere especially was just another solid overlooked 90s album I still cling to like the other two I mentioned upthread, except all of a sudden within the last 5-8 years this passionate cult audience emerged and exploded the value of all their records and CDs and their music is now worshipped.

The Bill Dixon Orchestra — Intents and Purposes.

and a couple more funky jazz picks because i can't sleep; with the recurring theme of revisiting the familiarities of one's youth.

les mccann - layers (1973)
fans of vintage synths and keyboard sounds should be well familiar with this one. this was before les started putting vocals on his records, so it has a very atmospheric vibe throughout. both sides are played in a "suite" style, with the songs morphing in and out of each other and themes being riffed on and then reprised later. super mellow for the most part, but it does have "the harlem dance buck strut" kicking off side two, which has got to be one of the spaciest, nastiest funk workouts i've ever heard. one of the most unique albums, not only in mccann's catalogue, but in post-coltrane jazz i'd reckon.

yusef lateef - yusef lateef's detroit latitude 42° 30' longitude 83° (1969)
if you know yusef lateef, you know to expect the unexpected, and this album is no different. i've never been to detroit, but i have to believe that this is exactly what it was like: a melting pot of sounds and culture that could be exhilarating, mysterious, dark, mournful, and beautiful - and maybe all at once. if there's one thing you could say about yusef lateef in the 60s, it's that he never followed anything except his own path. the map to where that path began is drawn out and illustrated on this album with such craft and love that it might be easy to forget that he also made several other indisputably classic albums; none of which sound like this one. which i'm sure was completely intentional.

word to joel dorn.

The two I know from your original list are Sulk and Sell Out, in what sense are they not what one would expect them to be?

― Halfway there but for you

Dunno, a legendary hard rock, proto-punk, garage rock, rock opera band makes a sort of precursor to Three Feet High and Rising with a bunch of beautiful but completely distinct songs intercepted and sometimes merged with fake mock ads.

Sulk is just a unique album in general I think.

And yeah, both are well known among musicheads, but are also possible to miss out on even if you are reasonably well-versed in the "canon".

i always thought the who sell out was considered an alltimer - i know that's how i classify it.

I do too, but every single time I’ve played a track from it (apart from “I Can See For Miles”) for friends who knew only the radio hits or the ‘70s albums, the reaction has always been either “THAT’S the Who?!” or, “That’s not the Who!”

which is why it's an alltimer.

(yes, shots fired)

Paul Kantner - Blows Against the Empire

The first album to pop into my head with this topic, that I'm unsure of canonization status is Insides' Euphoria. That album is fantastic, and still quite unique in the world of dream pop/ post-rock. But I might have just been slow in discovering it.

And on a completely different end musically, I do like to champion the frenetic Japanese pop of Plus-Tech Squeeze Box's Cartooom!, which has slowly been getting more of an audience due to finally showing up on some streaming services.

Fishbone, "The Reality of My Surroundings."

The Drones - "Havilah"
The Good, The Bad and The Queen
Jenny Hval - "Blood Bitch"
Noname - "Telefone"
Toro y Moi - "What For?"
Tyler the Creator - "IGOR" but probably already lauded, right?

The two I know from your original list are Sulk and Sell Out, in what sense are they not what one would expect them to be?

"Blue" Gene Tyranny - Out of the Blue

I guess the Associates album isn't what you would expect if you haven't heard them and vaguely imagine they sound like Simple Minds or Duran Duran.

Two examples I thought of:
Sound-On-Sound by Bill Nelson's Red Noise - even the handful of people who are curious about Be-Bop Deluxe will pass it by because of the name change. It's a combination of Berlin-era Bowie (sans instrumentals) and XTC/Devo manic new wave, and as good as any of those records.
x-dreams by Annette Peacock - recorded over six years, one side of bitterness and anger and one of love songs; not jazz but informed by her compositional history. She's a cult artist but this LP stands out in her career.

Kevin Ayers - Joy Of A Toy
Shudder To Think - Pony Express Record
O.L.D. - Formula
Shiina Ringo - Kalk Samen Kuri no Hana
Clammbon - Imagination
Gentle Giant - Free Hand
XTC - Mummer

Shudder to Think is a great example.
Free Hand is an excellent album, surely familiar to many prog rock fans, but I bet a lot of other people might like it.

XTC - Mummer

i will rep for this album as long as i'm breathing. great call.

Destroyer - Your Blues

Oh man, Shudder To Think is a perfect one too.

I wonder if streaming recommendations will shine a light on some lesser known works. Might just be me but I frequently see tracks fron The Durutti Column’s album ‘Vini Reilly’ which went pretty much under the radar on its release in 1989.

that's a perfect candidate too, dan. i am pretty much having a constant ongoing debate with myself about what his best album is - but that one is always in the running. always.

The first time I became aware that there even was such a thing as canon building was when I borrowed Paul Gambaccini's Top 100 Albums from a library in the late '80s. The Who Sell Out was *checks* #66. It had been in a similar position in the 1978 poll too apparently. So ever since I was child Sell Out has been firmly An Acclaimed Record in my tiny brain. (I didn't even hear it myself till much later.)

it's the who album for people who hate the who.

which is me. hi, nice to meet you.

I kinda thought that The Who Sells Out was out of print for quite a few years between LP and CD like quite a number of very popular 60s albums.

xp that makes sense, the only other who album i can really hang with is who's next. sell out is amazing, they really had something sweet going on there

I don’t think so — it was available on LP in tandem with Happy Jack in the US through the mid-‘80s, and the CD came out around 1988 or so.

xp

I am a bit curious on what of those big electronic and post rock records of the mid 90s to early 00s are now a couple decades later 'classics'.

Is 'Millions Now Living Will Ever Die' the big Tortoise album? Which GYBE! record is the ONE?

I'd say Boards of Canada's 'Children Have the Right to People' seems to be maybe as popular now as it was back when new. Aphex's 'SAW II' is probably popular as ever too.

I'm not a particular follower of post-rock or electronica, but I've heard the three you mention and two Godspeed records (and no others by those acts).

Re the Who, I don't see Sell Out as a big outlier in their catalog. They had released lots of "funny" songs as singles previously, and would sometimes do so later; and Tommy is so close to it stylistically that they actually reprise "Rael" in "Sparks". "Sunrise" or "Tattoo" would fit on Tommy too (with different lyrics).

lift yr skinny fists is the gy!be album that's most canonised still

i feel like tortoise have kinda faded away from their place in the canon at least compared to a decade ago & maybe tnt is more beloved than millions now living now? idk though

I'd say Boards of Canada's 'Children Have the Right to People' seems to be maybe as popular now as it was back when new.

I think it's much more popular now, and was maybe even more so 5-10 years ago. Same as Neutral Milk Hotel's Mangum opus (sorry) of the same year. Those may very well be the two biggest records of 1998 at this point. At the time they felt somewhat overshadowed by Autechre and Olivia Tremor Control respectively.

I don't really understand this thread.

Well, 'Kadriko' by Collage is a really unique and special album that not a lot if people know about, and it's one of my favorite records of all time.

'Plux Quba' by Nuno Cannavaro is a really unique and special album that a number of people would consider an all-time favorite, and it's been on a couple of lists near the bottom.

I can list some albums I like which are not 'Pet Sounds'

Blue" Gene Tyranny - Out of the Blue

― Hans Holbein (Chinchilla Volapük),

Agree with this, it's getting there maybe in terms of recognition, or maybe just seems that way cause he died recently.