Pearl Jam’s Ten. Love it. Anything else by Pearl Jam is a bowl full of Meh-cherries.
I live in the area where the band Live is from, and the only songs I ever hear on the radio are from Throwing Copper.
The Sugarcubes are close to this. Stick Around for Joy is their only solid album, but Blue Eyed Pop and some other song that they had some minor success with are also stuff I listen to off of Life’s Too Good!
If we expand this to artists that only had one excellent album, you can include Coheed and Cambria and Sloan, although I still listen to their other albums. Co&Ca’s Second Stage Turbine Blade is a little too aimlessly emo for me (now, I like emo with a hook or a point, but this doesn’t,) with the exception of a few songs, and Good Apollo I’m Burning Star IV is a bit too bland and ecletic to be a good-feeling concept album. Whereas In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth 3 is one of the best concept albums ever.
Sloan’s Navy Blues is a great Brit-invasionesque pop nugget, while their others are pretty good, but few songs on their other albums even match the worst songs on Navy Blues.
After all these years, I only have one Stones album, “Sticky Fingers”, and that’s enough for me.
Likewise, Elton John’s “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road”.
I’m almost weird that way, too, although I do dig The Bends quite a bit. I could never quite get into Kid A, Amnesiac, and all that.
It’s an easy and oft-cited one, but the only Liz Phair album I listen to consistently is Exile in Guyville. She’s got OK stuff on the next two albums, but I could never get myself to listen to either of those all the way through. And anything since the first three I haven’t listened to at all.
The only Beach Boys I really love is Pet Sounds. And love it I do, placing it at #1 in my all-time album list. The rest of their stuff, while solid and featuring often great songwriting, just doesn’t do it for me to warrant many repeated listens.
I think Phish’s Picture of Nectar is a blast and the rest is just doodly music.
Although I don’t agree, Phish was always about the live shows anyway.
I’ll throw Rusted Root’s When I Woke as a CD I really got into, and found everything else they have done to be pure crap. I can’t believe the same band released Remember as a follow up.
I’ve always preferred Kid A to OK Computer. It just seems like the Radiohead CD I reach for first.
I agree with you on the Rusted Root, but the live show negated the need to ever listen to the album again. It was… spectaculo!
Radiohead always seemed like Pink Floyd meets U2 without a groove to me.
Bonnie Raitt - Sweet Forgiveness - I don’t know why she records so many truly mediocre songs on her albums. Maybe she has curbed this trend latley but I have given up.
"Honky Chateau" is all the EJ I’ll ever need. Not that the rest of his catalog is awful or anything, but he really spoke to me on that one.
For me that album, Life’s Rich Pageant and Document are a trilogy, I can’t separate them … indeed I have trouble remembering which track is on which, they are all so good but similar.
My nominations for the OP are:
Fate’s Warning A Pleasant Shade of Grey
van der Graaf Generator The Quiet Zone/The Pleasure Dome
Genesis Selling England by the Pound
Rod Stewart Every Picture Tells a Story
Ultravox! Ultravox!
The Human League Travelogue
Supertramp Crime of the Century
Pavlov’s Dog Pampered Menial
Roger McGuinn The Cardiff Rose
Paul McCartney Band on the Run
For me, Metallica begins and ends with the Black Album. In fact, that’s about all the heavy metal I really like. I seem to be able to appreciate the best of the best in about any genre.
It’s a Beautiful Day’s first, self-titled, album is a joy. Then Linda LaFlamme left and the band was never the same. I know people say that their second album, Marrying Maiden, was as good or better than the first album, but this is incomprehensible to me.
If Metallica’s Black album is the best in the heavy metal genre, then I don’t know what to say. (I actually like everything Metallica did up to and including the black album, whereas most hardcore fans disassociate themselves with them at the black album. At any rate, it’s not the best of the best in that genre. It’s perhaps the best pop songwriting in the heavy metal genre, but their earlier work was much, much more interesting.)
I nearly deleted the ‘best of the best’ comment as being a bit pretentious, and now I see it was. Best Heavy Metal for a non Heavy Metal fan, maybe.
Probably stems from the ‘Punks’ vs ‘Rockers’ rivalry in High School. Took me several years to admit, ‘Hey, some of this stuff is OK’.
[nitpick]
Wings
[/nitpick]
Jeremy Spencer “Flee”
Jeremy Spencer was one of the first members of Fleetwood Mac. He predated John McVie who could join yet because of prior commitments to John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers. This was when Fleetwood Mac did the blues, primarily. As Fleetwood Mac’s sound evolved/changed Jeremy Spencer found himself isolated from the others and left the group in 1971.
When he came out of retirement in 1979, he released this album which flopped. Oddly enough it sounds like a Fleetwood Mac album, not bluesy at all.