19 thoughts on “Question of the Week: Which albums are horribly…”
Tupac’s All Eyez on Me
Easy: Dark Side of the Moon. It’s a great album but nowhere as good as the average, middle-aged Brit thinks it is.
OK, so I’ll be really unoriginal and say The Wall, which to me is a couple of really good songs wrapped in a bunch of bloat.
For me it’s definitely Tricky’s Maxinquaye. I think Christgau gave it an A+. I still have a copy of it, for research purposes only.
Oh, and hate to keep it in the 90’s, but also on the horribly overrated list: any album by Sleater-Kinney.
The collected works of Notorious B.I.G.
Astral Weeks
The Chronic
Colossal Youth
The Workingman’s Dead
and, oh yeah… Abbey Road
I’m sure that once this decade winds down even further there’ll be a lot more lauding of Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, but I always thought that record sounded dull and pretentious.
Radiohead’s Ok Computer, Zeppelin IV. Astral Weeks- maybe over-lauded but still a great album.
Anything by the Beatles, radiohead, pink floyd after barret, u2, hell almost any brit-pop.
On the modern side, that new Animal Collective album, whatever it’s called (Merriweather Pavillion?) that everyone’s slobbering over is cataclysmically bad.
On the historical side, I’ll agree that pretty much any Pink Floyd album’s only mediocre at best.
Neutral Milk Hotel “In the Aeroplane over the Sea”. I wrote a scathing pan of it on lala.com.
Anything by the Beatles, radiohead, pink floyd after barrwt, u2, hell almost any brit-pop.;
“Never Mind The Bollocks” – never lived up to the hype.
“Nevermind” – As above
I used to be a Tubular Bells man – since it ran for 25 minutes on side one, it was perfect for sex (in my mind, “epic” sex no doubt… oof…), not to mention being a “full doob” (e.g., one could casually smoke an entire joint, sometimes two, without otherwise having to stir) platter. I just got curious about it this week reading the Mojo piece on Mike Oldfield, so I dragged the old LP out and put it on and, uh…. wow. It sucks. Talk about misspent youth. But the sex was epic!
60s: Beatles: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
70s: Pink Floyd: The Dark Side of the Moon
80s: Paul Simon: Graceland
90s: Guided By Voices: Bee Thousand
00s: The National: Boxer
Not saying these are bad — only that the kudos were way out of proportion with the actual quality of the music and/or importance of the album.
And I beg to differ with Tom Lane: Maxinquaye was and still is easily as good as its hype, IMO.
Rio duran duran
anything by Zappa.
The first Moby Grape album, Sgt. Pepper, Band on the Run, anything by the Libertines.
I should have also added There’s A Riot Goin’ On, the last three Dylan albums and a lot of the noisier side of Sonic Youth.
overrated or lauded as being epic?
RockCritics.com 
Tupac’s All Eyez on Me
Easy: Dark Side of the Moon. It’s a great album but nowhere as good as the average, middle-aged Brit thinks it is.
OK, so I’ll be really unoriginal and say The Wall, which to me is a couple of really good songs wrapped in a bunch of bloat.
For me it’s definitely Tricky’s Maxinquaye. I think Christgau gave it an A+. I still have a copy of it, for research purposes only.
Oh, and hate to keep it in the 90’s, but also on the horribly overrated list: any album by Sleater-Kinney.
The collected works of Notorious B.I.G.
Astral Weeks
The Chronic
Colossal Youth
The Workingman’s Dead
and, oh yeah… Abbey Road
I’m sure that once this decade winds down even further there’ll be a lot more lauding of Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, but I always thought that record sounded dull and pretentious.
Radiohead’s Ok Computer, Zeppelin IV. Astral Weeks- maybe over-lauded but still a great album.
Anything by the Beatles, radiohead, pink floyd after barret, u2, hell almost any brit-pop.
On the modern side, that new Animal Collective album, whatever it’s called (Merriweather Pavillion?) that everyone’s slobbering over is cataclysmically bad.
On the historical side, I’ll agree that pretty much any Pink Floyd album’s only mediocre at best.
Neutral Milk Hotel “In the Aeroplane over the Sea”. I wrote a scathing pan of it on lala.com.
Anything by the Beatles, radiohead, pink floyd after barrwt, u2, hell almost any brit-pop.;
“Never Mind The Bollocks” – never lived up to the hype.
“Nevermind” – As above
I used to be a Tubular Bells man – since it ran for 25 minutes on side one, it was perfect for sex (in my mind, “epic” sex no doubt… oof…), not to mention being a “full doob” (e.g., one could casually smoke an entire joint, sometimes two, without otherwise having to stir) platter. I just got curious about it this week reading the Mojo piece on Mike Oldfield, so I dragged the old LP out and put it on and, uh…. wow. It sucks. Talk about misspent youth. But the sex was epic!
60s: Beatles: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
70s: Pink Floyd: The Dark Side of the Moon
80s: Paul Simon: Graceland
90s: Guided By Voices: Bee Thousand
00s: The National: Boxer
Not saying these are bad — only that the kudos were way out of proportion with the actual quality of the music and/or importance of the album.
And I beg to differ with Tom Lane: Maxinquaye was and still is easily as good as its hype, IMO.
Rio duran duran
anything by Zappa.
The first Moby Grape album, Sgt. Pepper, Band on the Run, anything by the Libertines.
I should have also added There’s A Riot Goin’ On, the last three Dylan albums and a lot of the noisier side of Sonic Youth.