Inspired by MTCicero’s thread, this is about otherwise perfect albums that have one glaring, awful song that you have to skip. I’m not talking about a weak song, or a song that you’ve just gotten tired of from overplay. I’m talking about the proverbial turd in the punchbowl. The song that you are grateful to iTunes for letting you delete the song from the album and pretend that it never existed in the first place.
Mine is “Dixie It Up”, a Dixieland band song stuck right in the middle of Two Loons for Tea’s otherwise perfect dream-pop album Nine Lucid Dreams. The album flows beautifully, wonderfully aurally caressing your ears…then this thing happens with trombones. I’m not damning Dixieland. It’s a perfectly fine type of Jazz music. Just NOT in the middle of this album!
Blackhole, and IIRC, Ramshackle by Beck. They have a decent song in their beginning, but at the and after a couple moments of fadeout they devolve into random radio-tuningesque noises that last for several minutes. Not a very good thing to pop up when you are randomly playing songs. I wonder if he would still do this in the era of MP3s. I always skip them well before they come up, and were I to play the albums, I’d turn off the album well before the songs end.
Brave Little Soldier from Dolly Parton’s Heartsongs.
The rest of the album is great. It showcases the folk / roots side of her music. This song in the middle a) doesn’t fit stylistically and b) is a sucky piece of glurge. It’s one that always gets skipped by me.
The only album that has a song I skip – out of the hundreds I have – is Beatles 1. “The Long and Winding Road” is one of their worst songs and it’s sad that it was the last we heard from them.
Madonna has a nearly flawless album called Erotica. Features some of her absolute best work, such as, Erotica, Thief of Hearts, Bad Girl, In This Life, Rain, Secret Garden, etc.
It features one hideous song called, ‘‘Did you do it?’’, a pseudo-rap by some guy which is not only boring, but features such moving lyrics as:
It goes on… explicitly. I think it’s supposed to be some kind of parody. I don’t care. Awful.
My ancient It’s a Beautiful Day LP has a yank-the-needle-off scratch before Wasted Union Blues (which gives me a headache). I also skip Red, Black & Green on Pharoah Sanders Thembi record. It’s just too discordant after the beautiful Astral Traveling.
Leonard Cohen’s I’m Your Man goes along nicely until “Jazz Police” leaps out and assaults you like a rabid turd-badger. Then it resumes and pretends nothing happened.
Garth Brook’s The Chase is different from his earlier stuff in that it’s got a darker theme going through it. Overall, I like it, but there’s one song called Dixie Chicken that’s just terrible.
Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs and Englishmen is one of my top ten favorite albums ever – except for a truly painful version of “Superstar” by Rita Coolidge that I always skip.
Blood on the Tracks by Bob Dylan - I cannot listen to Idiot Wind, but the rest of the album is superb.
**twickster **- Rita Coolidge’s *Superstar *is one of the many songs I used to really like on Mad Dogs and Englishmen. I’ll have to listen again and see how it’s held up.
Join Hands By Souxsie & The Banshees
A very good album but really could have done without the "Lord’s Ptayer " - a recreation of their first live appearance with (originally with Sid Vicious on Drums) .
Queen II
Some great tracks but a real downer with Roger Taylor’s clumsy attempt at songwriting - “Loser in the End” -
Chicago Transit Authority is a fantastic specimen of well-crafted horn-backed rock, and a great album from its era.
And then there’s “Free Form Guitar” right in the middle of it.
I wish someone would have told the band “You know, guys, I don’t think your audience is going to want to hear seven minutes of Terry Kath masturbating with a guitar.”
When I listen to The Blue Mask by Lou Reed I skip the first two tracks. “My House” is a sweet and sentimental tribute to his late friend and mentor. And Lou Reed just doesn’t do sweet and sentimental well. “Women” I just don’t like.
A lot of albums/CDs I love are guilty of this, but the worst could be Bruce Springsteen’s The Wild, The Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle, where “Wild Billy’s Circus Story” takes up space as an unlistenable dirge among several classic songs.
A different type of example is on the Pat Metheny Group’s We Live Here, where “The Girls Next Door” seems like it was included as a way to get airplay on “smooth jazz” stations, but it doesn’t fit in with the rest of the CD.