Hate the single, love the album

[some_white_dude]

“Last Nite” off of The Strokes’ Is This It? was a pretty boring track, but I found the rest of the album pretty fun.

[Ludovic]

@ZipperJJ

“Brick” on Ben Folds Five’s Whatever And Ever Amen. It was a good song for about a minute, then I quickly got tired of hearing it all over. But the album is top-notch.

Heck yeah. I forgot that one, that’s one of the prime examples. I fast-forward past Brick. (Thankfully, the first song I heard from them was “The ballad of who could care less”, which didn’t get as much airplay.)

[Critical1]

one way you can often tell your single isnt like the rest of the album is to check production on the tracks.
I cant tell you how many times the first single is produced by one guy and the rest of the album by someone else. usually only for newer artists though.

that said Tool’s first single off of Undertow was Sober, probably the only Tool track I actively dislike and definitly the one blemish on an otherwise masterpiece. I love that album from start to finish if you yank out Sober.

[Exapno_Mapcase]

@Only Mostly Dead

Great choice.
One of my favorite albums, Counting Crows August and Everything After, had as its initial single “Mr Jones,” a repetitive, catchy, high energy, but utterly disposable radio song. While the rest of the album had other energetic tracks like “Murder of One” (later released as a single) or “Rain King” (also later released as a single), most of the rest of the album is plaintive, moody, dark, with a lot of slow tracks and piano-based cuts.

Whereas I’ve since come to appreciate that there is more meaning buried in the lyric to “Mr Jones” than at first glance, I loathed the song when it first came out, and figured that it was probably representative of the entire album, some stupid white guy bouncing around in dreadlocks and a Davy Crockett jacket, total early 90s west coast Bohemian fodder. I still think the endlessly repeating four chord jingle that is the music is crap.

Unfortunately, I was one of the eight million people who bought that album on the strength of “Mr. Jones” and was unpleasantly surprised that the rest of the album was “plaintive, moody, dark, with a lot of slow tracks and piano-based cuts.” In short, absolutely unlistenable crap.

Which is why about 46 people bought their second album.

Despite our agreement on Joan Osborne, I guess we have different tastes.

[Ludovic]

@Critical1

one way you can often tell your single isnt like the rest of the album is to check production on the tracks.
I cant tell you how many times the first single is produced by one guy and the rest of the album by someone else. usually only for newer artists though.

that said Tool’s first single off of Undertow was Sober, probably the only Tool track I actively dislike and definitly the one blemish on an otherwise masterpiece. I love that album from start to finish if you yank out Sober.

That’s weird, someone gave me a copy of Aenima and I liked almost every track on it – not my style of music but surprisingly good at what they do – but none are as good as Sober IMO (then again I don’t have the album that song is from.)

[AHunter3]

@spooje

Yes’s 90125.

The single (a big hit) was ‘Owner of a Lonely Heart’. God, I hate that song.

Great album, though.

ditto that

@RealityChuck

“Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad” is the weakest song in Bat Out of Hell. Tolerable, but nowhere near as good as anything else there.

Can’t ditto that though. There are better songs, but “2 out of 3” compares favorably with “For Crying Out Loud” and “All Revved Up & No Place to Go”, at a minimum. I know it’s simple and on first listen is just a piece of audio candy, but the third verse gives it a little bit of barbed wire.
Anyway, onward… Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon is one of the best albums of all time. “Money” is the worst song on the album, limping in just behind “Any Colour You Like”. It’s a misfit on the album. The mood isn’t compatible with the rest of the songs. Meaning of the song isn’t relevant to the rest of the subject matter. And even as a standalone, against each of the other songs as standalone songs, it just isn’t as good. (OK, maybe on that basis it gets ahead of “Any Colour You Like” and perhaps the “Speak to Me” intro which would sound peculiar played by itself, but still…)
Alan Parsons Project’s Eye in the Sky contains ten tracks, 7 of which are spectacularly better than the eponymous “Eye in the Sky”. I admit it’s better than that silly “Psychobabble” track, and “Mammagamma”, an unusually weak instrumental for the Project, doesn’t really beat it out either. Still, compared to all the nice tracks they could have released as the single, they went with “Eye”??

[BwanaBob]

@dalej42

Genesis, We Can’t Dance.

The popular singles, Hold on my Heart, We Can’t Dance, and Jesus, He Knows me are the weakest songs on the album.

Fading Lights, Driving the Last Spike, and Dreaming While You Sleep **are **the album!

Ah yes, Fading Lights, where Genesis rip themselves off by regurgitating Ripples but in a slower tempo.

But Last Spike, I choose to think of that as the ONLY song on that album.

[Only_Mostly_Dead]

@Exapno Mapcase

Which is why about 46 people bought their [Counting Crows’] second album.

I’m going to hijack a little.

While no future albums came even remotely close to the sales numbers of August (7 times platinum, so says its Wikipedia page), the second album was still double platinum (and hit #1 on the Billboard 200), and the third found platinum (and up to #8 album on Billboard 200).

I’m done now.