George Harrison’s second solo album was nothing but Moog synthesizer “noodlings”.
From Wiki:
The album has received an unfavourable response from many rock critics; these writers dismiss it as unfocused, unstructured, and consisting of random sounds.
Even the cover is amateur… oh, here’s the whole album. If you dare…
You should hear the a cappella cover version a couple of my friends made.
Many years ago, my brother cracked up a record store clerk by showing him a copy of MMM and saying, “When this is put out on CD, we’ll know the apocalypse is coming soon.”
Guess what. It’s been released on CD.
This isn’t an album, but this is probably the penultimate “oddball” tune. People usually do not believe it really exists until they hear it, and sometimes not even then. It’s best known from being a “Dr. Demento” favorite.
I never thought Music from the Elder was bad and KISS let critics convince them to beat themselves up over it.
Wings Back to the Egg was weird and oddly inconsistent in it’s content, especially the song Arrow Through Me which didn’t match anything else on the LP. But overall it was an interesting and enjoyable album.
I wouldn’t have thought of it as an “oddball album.” If anything, their slightly later Wild Honey is at least as anomalous: lo-fi, R&B-influenced, and mostly avoiding the trademark Beach Boys harmonies—yet I love the album.
At the time, Pink Floyd used a blues song as their encore. It was good blues, but not what the audience expected.
They wanted to dampen the audience’s expectations to avoid another encore. They’d already been playing for over two hours without a break in the music (though all left the stage at one point and played a tape of concrete music that was fascinating).
I’d go with The Beach Boys Love You with lyrics like “Honkin’ honkin’ down the gosh darn highway” and songs about roller skating and the solar system. It is a quirky record with a bit of a synth pop sound to it and pretty much not what you’d expect when you think “The Beach Boys.” It’s got its avid fans, and currently has been more favorably than not looked on by critics. I find it a decent listen, but may take a couple spins to appreciate. As cliche as it is, Pet Sounds will remain their masterpiece and perhaps my favorite all-time pop/rock album, running neck-and-neck with My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless.
I might go with Smashing Pumpkins’s Adore. Billy Corgan moved to a more electronic sound with looped drums on this album, after drummer Jimmy Chamberlin was booted from the band for shooting up heroin with the touring keyboardist. The keyboardist ODed and died. So this album did not have their trademark hard rock guitar-and-drums forward sound. I remember at the time fans being bemused by it to outright hating it. I thought it was great, if different. I feel like the retrospective assessment of the album has finally started to brighten on it. Maybe influenced by all the mediocre albums to follow.
“Goo” is among my lowest-ranked Sonic Youth albums (though it has an iconic cover), I’m sorry that’s what you ended up seeing…you might have liked a later version of the band.
Wow, a lot of good ones. And by good, I mean good and odd.
Overnight I gave Trans a sample relisten and listened to some samples of Arc, which I had definitely never heard before. Yeah, Trans is a mainstream masterpiece compared to Arc. Neil definitely overdoes stuff like the ‘robot voice’ sound on Trans, but a couple of those songs aren’t half bad. Arc, on the other hand, I cannot imagine anybody sitting back and playing that album in its entirety for enjoyment all the way through. All I was able to find online was a live version of it, and I feel bad for the audience who came to see Neil young and had to listen to that.
Still, there were some traces of musicality in Arc-- it was better than:
WTF, George Harrison? What kind of bad weird place was he in at the time to make something like that? When music legends go off the rails, they do not do it halfway, it seems.
Yeah, count me as an unbeliever who had to google it to make sure it was actually something made by Styx. The whole album could easily count as Styx’s ‘oddball’ album. From the wiki entry on ‘The Serpent is Rising’:
Described as a loose concept album, The Serpent Is Rising contains a number of sexual innuendos. The baroque prog “The Grove of Eglantine” (written by DeYoung) was about a woman’s vagina.
[…]
Styx considers The Serpent Is Rising to be their worst recording. Dennis DeYoung is indirectly quoted as saying it was “one of the worst recorded and produced in the history of music.”
And RE: the song "Don’t Sit Down on the Plexiglass Toilet (again from the wiki entry on the album):
“Weird Al” Yankovic supposedly loved it.
So there’s an endorsement.
I mean, I bought “The Serpent is Rising” when I was around 15, and I liked quite a bit of it, even the spoken-word Krakatoa. In retrospect, it was a little prog.
I might give the rest of the album a listen at some point. I mean, I have to admit I am curious to hear how the song…
baroque prog “The Grove of Eglantine” (written by DeYoung) was about a woman’s vagina.
…as I quoted from the wiki entry on the album in my previous thread.
But there’s only so much bad / weird / odd music I can listen to at once, and I have a lot to catch up on from this thread!
Really? That, Dirty and Daydream Nation are my top 3. I’m a relatively casual listener of their stuff, though, so don’t know the deeper cuts.
Yeah, I think a lot of people have Goo near the top, it just was never a favorite for me. Daydream Nation and Dirty both rate highly for me, not just for SY, but among all bands, especially Daydream Nation. I’m listening to Goo again right now, though, we’ll see.
A couple from the Four Seasons:
The Genuine Imitation Live Gazette was their attempt at a concept album reflecting on American life in the late 60s. They brought in Jake Holmes (the original writer of "Dazed and Confused’) and did a credible job with the concept. It flopped badly, since the group was a singles act and their fans didn’t like it.
Also of note is The Four Seasons Recorded Live on Stage. It’s a contractual obligation to Vee Jay Records, but is not live at all – just a series of studio tracks with the sound of the audience and introductions and patter from the band. It’s also only covers and standards (“Blues in the Night,” “Brotherhood of Man,” “Mack the Knife”), with only one song written by the group and none of their hits. Probably songs in their repertoire when they were just coming up. Not bad, but odd. It’s not even listed on their Wikipedia page.
All too often, I’ve found that when I express disappointment, fanboys of that particular band are lightning quick to assuage my disappoint with the pat “but it’s a concept album”. Not in every case, but filtered within my tastes, “concept album = diplomatic immunity for sucking”.
This immediately brought to mind Marvin Gaye’s Here, My Dear, an album for which he was obligated to provide half his earnings to his (recently divorced) ex-wife as a settlement. Intended as a quick throwaway, the album is essentially Gaye working through his feelings about the divorce. The album didn’t sell well and was considered a failure (and “weird”), though it has regained critic’s regard over the years since.
Nobody mentioned The Life Aquatic - Studio Sessions, so I’ll.
Talented Brazilian guitarist/vocalist Seu Jorge doing David Bowie covers in the acoustic Bossanova/Fado style.
The concept is borderline too twee, some of it really didn’t work, but a lot of it really did. Say what you want, but the man committed to the bit.
I LOVE Seu Jorge’s Bowie covers! Well worth a listen…
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From the YouTube notes:
The only members from Styx on the song are the 2 Johns and Chuck. Dennis and JY wanted nothing to do with the song. They don’t appear on it anywhere.
Chuck said it was a big FUCK YOU to Dennis [DeYoung] who, at the time, was writing artsy-fartsy Emerson, Lake & Palmer crap.
A friend of mine owned “Electronic Sound”, and said he’d sell it after everyone’d forgotten about it and it was rare.
Well, he forgot about it, too…
…Until George died. Then he got a pretty pence for it from a “completist” collector.
As one who finds 99% of Wes Anderson’s work to be unbearably twee, I thought the scenes with Seu Jorge’s covers were the best part of 'The Life Aquatic" by far; a welcome anchor of talent and realness among all the preciousness and fantasy.
Well, according to the wiki about the album I posted earlier:
The baroque prog “The Grove of Eglantine” (written by DeYoung) was about a woman’s vagina.
So DeYoung wasn’t writing stuff all that much more artsy-fartsy and high-minded at the time, though the song does sound like something ELP might have made.