For me, the following artists are ones I can pop in any CD (or Album) and be able to listen to it all the way through with few or no skips over songs:
Def Leppard
Yes
Billy Squier
Abba
The Beatles
The Monkees
Weird Al Yankovic (the guy is a genius)
I have other favorites where the albums I have of theirs are some of my favorites, but I haven’t listened to everything in their catalog, so I can’t make the claim as I can for the bands above…a few examples would be:
Peter Gabriel
Eagles
Duran Duran
ELO
The Moody Blues
I wish I could say this about my favorite band - 311 - but I was kind of disappointed in their last album. That’s not to say I totally disliked it. I would confidently say they’ve never made a bad album.
I almost included FNM, but when they released King for a Day… Fool for a Lifetime, I can’t say I wasn’t a little disappointed. The album has now grown on me (a lot), just it was a little underwhelming after Angel Dust.
The Hives - although they’re getting dangerously close to being a one-trick pony. But I can crank up to any of their four albums and start spazzing.
If I cheat and consider David Lee Roth era Van Halen an act separate from the Hagar and Cherone incarnations, then I’d nominate them. All 6 DLR-era Van Halen albums put a smile on my face (yes, even Diver Down, with all the cover tunes)
If I pretend John Lennon never handed the Get Back session tapes over to Phil Spector and left Let It Be unreleased (maybe allowing “One After 909” and “I, Me, Mine” to get out as B-sides), then The Beatles qualify. The White Album has a lot of cruddy filler, but there’s enough good stuff to keep it from being a disappointment.
I’d be interested in knowing which albums you’ve heard because I think everything after Notorious (1986-87) has ranged from mediocre (e.g., Wedding Album, Medazzaland, Astronaut) to not that good (e.g, Big Thing, Red Carpet Massacre, Liberty, Thank You) just plain bad (e.g., Pop Trash).
I have:
Seven and the Ragged Tiger, Red Carpet Massacre, Big Thing, Thank You, Astronaut, Decade, Duran Duran, and Essential Night versions.
Like I said in my post, I haven’t heard their whole catalog and there are plenty of songs on Big Thing, Thank You and Decade that I don’t like…
I was in high school during their heyday and generally liked what I heard from them on the radio. I didn’t have money back then to buy their albums, and once I got older, I forgot about them for a while. It might be that I would like more of their stuff – then again, I might not!
OK, thanks. I was just curious. Personally, I would get every album chronologically up to Notorious and then stop. I would also get So Red the Rose by the spin off group Arcadia (1986).
DD just started back in the studio again working on another album with Mark Ronson. We’ll see how that goes.
Hopefully, they will stop trying to be popular with the kids and just write good music again. Red Carpet Massacre, their most recent attempt at a “hit” by recruiting Timbaland and Justin Timberlake, was not a good idea and suffered from a lack of Andy Taylor. Then they compounded the problem by releasing the uber-boring Falling Down as the first single. UGH! IMHO.
Are any Queen albums of the sort you’d classify as “disappointing”? It seems they fairly successfully stuck to their model and what’s considered their big hits or really interesting songs are scattered across the various albums?