Overrated Albums

Posted 15 June, 2007 in Music |

As I’m writing this, I’ve got Who’s Next on the stereo. For me, that’s one of those timeless albums, one of those few (oh, so very few) albums that doesn’t have a single dud track on it, that sounds just as vibrant and essential today as it did when it was first released in 1971. (Or, so I assume, since that was also the year I was born, and I wasn’t yet a Who fan, to the best of my memory.) Everything about that album seems right: the extended synth intro to “Baba O’Reilly” that opens it; Roger Daltrey’s anguished howl of anger on “Won’t Get Fooled Again” (which, with it’s cynical imprecation to “Meet the new boss / Same as the old boss” could well be the perfect anthem for our times); and — especially — Keith Moon’s ferocious drumming.

I’ve written about essential albums before (on the old site, here and here); Who’s Next more than qualifies, as do Bone Machine by Tom Waits, Sticky Fingers by the Stones, and London Calling by The Clash.

Then there are those albums that don’t see the inside of the CD player that often, but on those occasions that I do drag them out, I’m almost startled by the revelation, “Fuck, this is a really good record.” This category would include Elvis Costello’s severely underrated Mighty Like a Rose, Mae Moore’s lambent Bohemia, and Lloyd Cole’s playfully anti-romantic opus Don’t Get Weird on Me, Babe.

Then there are those albums that everyone considers timeless classics, essentials of the canon, that I just plain don’t get. You know the ones I’m talking about: perennials on those “Best Rock ‘n’ Roll Records of All Time” lists; overproduced monstrosities like Bat Out of Hell, cartoonish pseudo-aggressiveness like Never Mind the Bollocks by the Sex Pistols — the Monkees of punk rock — and practically anything by Led Zeppelin. (I always get in trouble for this one, but as far as I’m concerned they are the most overrated band in rock history: “Whole Lotta Love” is a pretty decent rock song, but “Kashmir” is boring and repetitive, and the only reason for “Stairway to Heaven” even to exist is because it’s a six-minute slow(ish) song that gives horny teenagers at high school dances an excuse to cop a feel.)

Fortunately, the folks at the Guardian feel the same way, and have commissioned some expert musicians to cut the knees out from some giants of the rock pantheon. Albums that come under fire include heavy hitters like Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band, which Billy Childish calls “middle-of-the-road rock music for plumbers”; Dark Side of the Moon, which Tjinder Singh of Cornershop says is “a bloated concept album that made punk necessary”; and Meat Is Murder, which Jackie McKeown of 1990s likens to “being stuck in a lift with a Manchester University Socialist Workers’ Party convention.”

Also falling victim (finally!) to the Guardian’s tender mercies is The Neon Bible by Arcade Fire, the inexplicably popular Canadian collective, which Greer Gartside of Scritti Politti rightly points out is “solidly unattractive, texturally nasty, a bit harmonically and melodically dull, bombastic and melodramatic, and the rhythms are pedestrian.”

But the Guardian piece is worth reading, if for no other reason, thanks to Ian Rankin’s extended takedown of The Velvet Underground and Nico, which is strident, hilarious, and long overdue. Rankin says that Nico “sings English the way I sing German,” and that’s one of the more complimentary remarks he makes. Great stuff for anyone who, as Rankin suggests, enjoys seeing sacred cows turned into hamburger.

(Thanks to AA for pointing me toward this article.)

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