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16 comments:
Thanks for the topic, Matthew. Off the top of my head, I think the first album I bought that disappointed me was The Fine Art of Surfacing by The Boomtown Rats. The singles were definitely the best tracks on that album. Sadly, it hasn't grown on me over the years.
I purchased The World of David Bowie as a teenager on holiday in the early 80s. I really liked Scary Monsters and was working my way through his back catalogue (I think this was before Let's Dance) and found this collection of his early Decca material, with a Ziggy era cover, on budget priced cassette . The mix of mid 60's folk/whimsy/Antony Newley absolutely baffled me. It was nothing like any of his other material and was a promptly shelved after one or two plays.
I'm still not particularly keen on this era of Bowie but the collection does include 'Silly Boy Blue' and 'The London Boys' which I now think are both brilliant. Probably his first two songs which suggest the genius to follow. Just start with Hunky Dory.
DW
A disappointing album? Hmmmmmm.well, after "Band on the Run" and "Venus and Mars", I was pretty excited about the next Wings album. "Wings at the Speed of Sound" let me down. Not bad, really, but certainly not at the level of the previous two.
As for those old LPs- I sold all mine, about 300, about 10 years ago. I don't really miss them as I've been piling up cds, and have more now than I ever had in vinyl. However, about a month after I sold the last of my albums, my nephew called. Seemed he had started collecting vintage vinyl and wondered if I still had any! I told him that regrettably he was a bit late, but at least I did find a forgotten stash of a couple dozen that I did give him. Alas, timing is everything...
Oh my god — SO MANY…
The following all count as ‘Jump the Shark’ albums for me. Bands that I’d previously liked or loved, and then they put out THESE things, and never recovered.
Meat Loaf’s terrible BAT OUT OF BELL follow-up, DEAD RINGER. Great Bernie Wrightson cover art but the album itself has consistently refused to get any better over all these decades.
Cheap Trick’s ALL SHOOK UP. It has one genuinely good, catchy, punchy, melodic rocker right out of the gate called ‘Stop This Game’. But the rest of it just sits there. Beatles-y production from George Martin can only do so much when the tunes are so flaccid and shapeless. I’ve given this one so many chances — every few years I give it a spin, but nope. They had a few good singles after this, but full-length albums, forget about it.
Alice Cooper’s FROM THE INSIDE. He had a great run from LOVE IT TO DEATH through LACE AND WHISKEY, then pfffffftttt.
Queen’s HOT SPACE. It’s torture! Still! To this day!
(Actually, I have no idea, I’ve never listened to it again after that first spin. It might be perfectly fine. But I’ll probably go to my grave without ever hearing it again, and I’m totally fine with that.)
Kiss UNMASKED. I like it a TINY bit better today than at first listen. And they did actually make a few halfway decent albums later — REVENGE is actually quite good.
Oh, and of the four Kiss Solo albums, Peter Criss’ is the one that’s virtually unlistenable, front-to-back. Every Kiss fan had to buy it to complete the set, and every fan I’ve ever spoken to has hated it.
ELO’s DISCOVERY (or as many disgruntled fans called it at the time, DISCO? VERY!) — I LOATHED it back in the day, but have to admit it’s grown on me.
Impulse buys from bands I hadn’t heard previously :
Starz, partially made up of ex- Looking Glass guys. First album was heavily promoted in the U.S. music mags. Thought it sounded like generic wannabe Stones. If Wikipedia is to be believed, they became something of a cult band. Whatever!
Starcastle, blatantly derivative of Yes’s signature Twee Prog sound. Kinda hilarious, actually.
Crawler. No idea why I took a chance on this one. Maybe I got it cheap in a cut-out bin? I listened to it on Youtube a few years back and it didn’t ring any bells.
One-hit wonders that couldn’t go the distance:
Tommy Tutone’s debut album. Bought it on the strength of their hooky, ear-wormy single ‘Jenny (867-5309)’. The rest of the album was completely unremarkable.
Quarterflash — i liked their smash hit ‘Harden My Heart’, bought the album and don’t remember ANYTHING about it.
b.t.
I recall being completely baffled by my first Sun Ra record, a copy of the 'Heliocentric Worlds vol 2' - one of his most 'out there' as it turned out - which I found remaindered, not long after reading something about him and being curious.
That would be (I think) in '83... and I had absolutely no frame of reference for that kind of thing back then (it wasn't like listening to, say, the Residents who sounded a bit strange at first but gave you a sort of context to get it).
www.youtube.com/watch?v=DahPF3ruQum
Still, you spend money on a record, you're going to listen to it. And before long it got me interested in that whole area of music.
As it happens, small-run independent label 'jazz' records like that - which weren't too hard to find cheaply second hand back then - became fashionable in time for the internet era, and you could sell them for a fair bit on Ebay.
Not that I generally want to get rid of them, but it can be helpful to make ends meet sometimes (like being self-employed during a pandemic).
-sean
Ooops, I completely misunderstood the question — not a dozen or so duds, just the FIRST album that I really truly regretted buying? Probably one of those first three Kiss albums. All the hard-rocking stormers that sounded so crunchy and mean on their live album KISS ALIVE are weak and slow on KISS, thick and sludgy on HOTTER THAN HELL and just completely lacking any kind of ‘bottom end’ on DRESSED TO KILL, so that they sound like they’re coming from an AM radio in the next room.
I can’t say I really regretted buying any of the three — I was a newly-minted Kiss fan, so I practically HAD to own them — but they sure didn’t get played on my turntable very often. At the time, I liked DRESSED TO KILL the least because of its incredibly thin sound, but over the years I’ve come to like it better than the other two. The songs are at least played at a decent tempo.
Or it might be that debut Starz album. When I dumped all my vinyl about 20 years ago, I started out by going through them one at a time, seeing if there were any I wanted to save (I ended up keeping maybe ten at most). I found the Starz album and on a whim slid the record out of its sleeve — the thing looked absolutely pristine, no dust, no fingerprints, not a single scratch. I literally must have played it just the once back in ‘76, put it back in its sleeve and forgot about it.
b.t.
Now that I understand the question, I have a few thoughts:
1) Romeo Void which featured the song "A Girl in Trouble is a Temporary Thing." The rest of the album never grew on me.
2) Heaven 17 album "How Men Are" At first I was not thrilled. But after a few listens i came to like it a lot. I think the song "The Skin I'm In" really disappointed me and it still does. But IIRC the rest of the album grew on me quite nicely after subsequent playings.
3) Black Sabbath's Greatest Hits. Besides the 3 "biggies" off Paranoid I thought the rest of the album blew goat though I did like "Fairies Wear Boots."
My worst album was by Bob Dylan live at Budokan. I love Dylan and in 1978 I was really enjoying his album.s when this came out. Sadly just not a good album at all for me and at the time it cost a lot of money.
DW, I remember that World of David Bowie LP with the Ziggy Stardust era cover Like you I was baffled by it at the time but there are some really nice tracks on it ( a lot of show tunes though). I'm actually on a wee holiday for a week in South of England and came across this LP, I am considering buying it as I gave my copy away years ago.
Album I didn't like then that I now love Bowues Low album . Took me a good few months( years?) to get it but it's now one of my favourites, especially Sound and Vision.
Paul
I don't think they did us any favours putting the Ziggy era cover on it. It gave an expectation of a very different style of music. As I said, I now think the Silly Boy Blue and London Boys two tracks are brilliant and would probably play the album had it not been long los. And if I had a tape deck.
I did pick up the Love You Till Tuesday soundtrack, a few years later, which overlapped some of the songs, but also included the original Space Oddity and Laughing Gnome and, therefore, seemed a bit more relevant.
I liked Low when I bought it in the early 80s and like it even more now. My favourite of the Eno albums.
DW
lost
Matthew, the Boomtown Rats had two No.1 singles - Rat Trap and I Don't Like Mondays.
My guess is Sir Bob Geldof has earned quite a bit due to his extensive activism?
E.g., he organized the whole "Band Aid" thing in 1985?
Does one "get rich" being a knight, albeit an Irish one? Are there a lot of musical knights in the UK?
Side story... September 1985 Charlie is in a flight of CH47s flying from Germany to Turkey. They ask us about detouring to Sudan or Ethiopia b/c the grain purchased via Band Aid was rotting on the docks to heavy rains. It was a serious plan but then some terrorist incident or such happened in the area and the US military said "no way." And we continued on our merry way to Turkey. (They also wanted us to assault the Achille Lauro which had just been hijacked and my boss said, "N.f.way..." lol. )
Doesn't Bob Geldof own a TV production company or something? If so, I suspect that's where most of his money comes from.
Charlie, the only other knights I can think of from the sphere of Popular music are Elton John, Cliff Richard, Paul McCartney, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice. There've been zillions of Classical musicians who've been knighted.
Matthew, as Colin says, the Boomtown Rats had two UK Number Ones. They had 12 Top 40 singles - and 3 Top 10 albums, one of which went platinum. The other 2 went gold.
Matthew, I reckon that singles comp is has some entertainment value for anyone familiar with Sun Ra, although you could probably get that from just reading about it in a review.
But yeah, without knowing anything about him you wouldn't even have that novelty value.
Xmal Deutschland is a name I haven't heard for ages... I actually taped stuff they did for John Peel off the radio once. Not that I'm particularly into mediocre goth - or for that matter, better goth (whatever that is) - but they were German so I was probably hoping they sounded like Einsturzende Neubauten or something.
The only record I recall ever buying on 4AD was a 12" single by Colourbox, 'Baby I Love You So'. Which I've still got actually, as its really good. Although it doesn't sound very 4AD to me -
www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0h2zVmxutA
-sean
Personally, I was hugely disappointed with "House Of Blue Light" by Deep Purple...love the band & everthing -- but after the highly successful "Perfect Strangers" collection, it was such a let down!
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