Also highly recommend his Washington Square Serenade.
Thanks! Never knew about this.
I’m sorry, I know that the OP restricted it to one album, but I just cannot help it: I’m listening to the Saint’s debut album “(I’m) Stranded”, and I think that this groundbreaking record isn’t much known in America. The case is, parallel to the Ramones, the Saints developed a very similar punk sound independently in Australia, without the bands of course knowing of each other. They were the first band outside the US to release a punk single, (I’m) Stranded, in 1976, even before the Sex Pistols or the Damned in the UK. And the album is just as raucous as the first Ramones album. It’s like Leibniz and Newton independently developing calculus at the same time, though I’ve never heard of the Ramones and the Saints quarreling later about the invention of punk rock.
I’m agonna do ANOTHER one.
For the past fifteen years, I’ve been trying to start a discussion here about Laura Nyro. Every thread has gone bust.
Laura was Big News in 1968-70, when she brought out her three great albums: Eli and the Thirteenth Confession; New York Tendaberry; Christmas and the Beads of Sweat. She refused to do any publicity or appear on tv, and dropped off the cultural radar by the early 1970s. Several of the tunes on her first albums became big hits for the bands that covered them.
15 years ago I challenged myself by first buying her New York Tendaberry. Very DARK album. Heard things that hooked me GOOD, and led me back to Eli and the Thirteenth Confession, which I read could be heard out of dorm windows across the country in 1969, in tandem with The Band’s brown album. Eli is definitely her pleasing record, with “Sweet Blindness,” “Eli’s Coming,” “Stoned Soul Picnic,” “Emilie,” and my personal favorite “Timer.”
Give Laura a try…start with Eli and go on to NYT if it tickles you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfW41eKUkKEGlad to see Tull mentioned, and so early in the thread. I would have chosen Benefit but won’t argue.
I listen to a lot of music that fits into this category. Here’s one that immediately pops into mind… Chinese Vacation by Steve Poltz. It’s full of wildly inventive songs like I Killed Walter Matthau It features a wonderful, funny song about a break-up… Here It’s fun, adjacent to pop music, and engaging.
I once attended a concert wherein Mr. Poltz sang a song about a specific heckler in the audience being a pedophile. It was one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen.
Do all you want, 'cause you got good fucking taste in music.
I didn’t actually mean one post per poster. Just trying to avoid people dropping a list of 10 records at a time. Good stuff. Carry on!
One of my favorite prog rock albums from the 70s - Camel “(Music inspired by) The Snow Goose”.
Based on a novella by Paul Gallico.
Sample track: “Dunkirk” Dunkirk - YouTube
Well in that case… Vintage Violence by John Cale.
The albums Cale made after his departure from the Velvet Underground were basically all over the place - extreme avant-garde (Church Of Anthrax), Classical (The Academy In Peril), almost twee (Paris 1919), cynically raucous (Sabotage)… all worth a listen, some very good, but no pattern to them at all. And at the heart of them is Vintage Violence, which oddly is almost middle-of-the-road, albeit with an inevitable strange Cale-ish twist. I would say it’s Cale at his most accessible, verging at times on flat-out gorgeous.
Try Big White Cloud, for example.
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Mentioned before, but it’s a great album. Brasileiro, a 1992 album by Sergio Mendes. Old timers will remember his pop albums with his group Brazil 66. This ain’t that.
Bill Morrissey’s Inside.
Coffee house/folk. A lovely, plaintive and playful album. The NY Times did a nice review.
It’s a great album to listen to to feel, not sad really, but maybe to have a slow, soft chuckle at the life of the outsider. Stark solitude adorned with beautiful fiddle playing and poetic lyrics. It’s feels a little like Nebraska, with 60% less tragedy and drama.
10000 Maniacs the Wishing Chair from 1985. They hit it big with their next album In My Tribe.
Thanks for your recommendation! I’ve heard a few of her songs before, but they didn’t fully grab me until now.
Her vocals are so supercharged that she makes other singers seem somehow deficient.
(And let’s not even get into her songwriting talents…)
I’m an informal booster of the Minus Five’s album of the same name. It can’t be topped for a cheerfully upbeat dark and depressive collection of songs, flavored with a variety of styles ranging from driving rock to Beatlesque to steel guitar-tinged semi-country.
Of all its great songs, Cemetery Row" may be the best. It reminds me of the ghastly netherworld at the end of Jim Thompson’s novel “The Getaway”, containing a line that invokes the atmosphere of the Straight Dope circa 2020:
Everybody knows
This old house is cold and crowded with half-wits
If more than a couple people on this site have heard this one, I’ll be amazed.
The second, self-titled, album from Barbara Keith. Folk rock songs almost entirely written by the singer (“All Along the Watchtower” being the exception).
I heard it playing in Tower Records in the early 70’s, but didn’t have the cash to buy it. A few months later, with the song “A Stones Throw Away” still in my head, I went in to buy a copy and there were no copies (anywhere I looked, it turned out).
I kept an eye out in record bins (and eventually online) for almost 30 years, then the album surfaced as a CD offered on the website of the singer and her band, the Stone Coyotes (described as “AC/DC meets Patsy Cline”). I now know that the singer was so unhappy with the album that she gave the record company its advance money back and dropped out of the business. The record company stopped promoting, pressing, or distributing the album and it disappeared for all intents and purposes.
I’d say any of the Black Sabbath albums in the '80s/'90s with Tony Martin on vocals (The Eternal Idol, Headless Cross, TYR, Cross Purposes) but if you had to pin me down to one of them I’d say Headless Cross.
The Crazy World of Arthur Brown. The guy was a one-hit wonder with Fire, but his album was an interesting precursor to metal bands.
Gun Metal Sky - Lori Lieberman
Lori was the first person to record/release “Killing Me Softly With His Song,” which was inspired by her poem about seeing Don McLean in concert. She has had several hiatuses and career re-starts over the years, but her voice and songwriting skills have only gotten better.