Yes, I know we have chipmunks, comic characters, etc., but I’m from the 60’s/70’s, grew up with the Partridge Family, and I have to say The Blue Brothers “Briefcase Full of Blues” is exemplary, it started as a gag with the amazing original Saturday Night Band, including Matt Guitar Murphy, Donald Duck Dunn, Blue Lou Martini, Steve Cropper, Mr. Fabulous, Murphy Dunne, Willie Hall, not to mention the original Jake and Elwood, they turned a gimmick into a serious blues album…
Two of the Spinal Tap albums are pretty good. The music is good and the lyrics make you think about them.
“All You Need Is Cash” by The Rutles has some wonderful parodies of Beatles songs.
Songs include:
An a capella cover of the classic Who album Petra Haden sings The Who Sell Out
Grown-up Me fully approves of the first three suggestions and thinks they’re going to be hard to beat. But Kid Me wants to suggest Pac-Man Fever, or maybe Mickey Mouse Disco.
This one by Barkmarket.
Ben Folds’ album with William Shatner - called Has Been - is quite listenable.
I quite like the album "“Having a Beard is the New Not Having a Beard” by The Beards.
Utopia’s “Deface the Music” has the same concept but better execution.
"Princess Leia’s Stolen Death Star Plans" is a parody of Sgt. Pepper, but it’s really well done. Using the original order of the songs on the Beatles’ album, they matched each song to the plotline of the original Star Wars – not just lyrically, but in the tone of the songs, as well.
Luther Wright & The Wrongs redid Pink Floyd’s The Wall in bluegrass. It’s very good and to top it off, before releasing it, they got Roger Waters’ blessing.
The Darkness - Permission to land.
I will let you search for all the other remaining tracks.
'Not sure if it counts as a “gimmick” or not, but I’ve always loved Kashmir: Symphonic Led Zeppelin.
I was gonna mention this–here’s a taste. It’s really good.
BlöödHag’s Necrotic Bibliophilia. A death metal album of nothing but biographies of famous science fiction writers. Wonderful, accurate, learned, hilarious mini-biographies. That you need a lyric sheet to understand a word of.
There was a band called Big Daddy that did modern songs (back in the '80s) as if they were songs from the '50s; Sussido in the style of Runaround Sue, that sort of thing. It’s kinda fascinating, sometimes.
They also did a version of Sgt. Pepper. Here’s A Day in the Life done as a Buddy Holly song. It works.
Of course the Blues Brothers were awesome - they had one of the best R&B bands ever put together, and both Ayckroyd and Belushi put their heart into it. Belushi even turned into a pretty good singer.
I’ll give a shout-out to Dread Zeppelin, in which a 300lb Elvis impersonator and his band do Reggae-influenced covers of Led Zeppelin - that mostly work quite well.
the 3 Golden Throats albums are funny , they are celebs singing , in most cases they are bad singers.