What is your most over-rated or over-hyped LP.......?

I only turned 59 last month, and a few month’s ago got the latest CD Remaster of Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. I’d never owned this, but read some reviews and thought this is one album from my youth I out to own for the first time… Have listened to it a number of times, and apart from the single’s on there, I just don’t get it at all… Over to you…

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I have GYBR in my CD collection, having owned the vinyl version a long time ago. It doesn’t get played much these days, but still enjoyable when it does make an appearance. For me it brings back memories of my 6th form common room, where we had an old record player with a very warn stylus that did our vinyl records (including my copy of GYBR) no favours at all. Quite a few good tracks on it imo.

Although I don’t own a copy I think the Beatles White Album could be classified as overated. Some great tracks, but the album is too long and contains too many so-so songs to make it a truly iconic album .

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Well, straight off the top of my head here’s a couple. For sheer self-indulgence by the artist I reckon that “Tarkus” by ELP rates pretty high. Keith Emerson was a GREAT keyboard player but he fell into the “Gimics” trap and the music became secondary to effects and the end result suffered. For the most over-hyped/over-rated album my nomination is - wait for it! - “The Dark Side Of The Moon” by Pink Floyd. I’ve always thought it pretentious and to be honest I believe that “peer pressure” and “cultural superiority” had a lot to do with it’s success, if you happened to to say that it was just an average album by an average group you were treated like a heretic who should be boiled in oil, hung, drawn and quartered then burned at the stake! I thought it was over-rated then, and I still do. Sorry fans!

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Touch-paper lit there Roger…! As for DSOTM… I love it ! :joy:

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Not a great ELP fan, but can’t agree with you on Pink Floyd DSOTM which is a masterpiece. I suspect you might of been playing the album at the wrong speed, it should be 33 rpm not 45 rpm!!

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I totally agree with you on the Beatles “White Album”. There was enough good stuff for one LP, the rest was dross! I forgot it otherwise I’d have put it in my post!

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Back in the day, a good friend had Meat Loaf’s Bat out of Hell on cassette - he played it endlessly when we were out in his car - drove me mad :crazy_face: Great band, couldn’t stand Meat Loaf himself… Front-men… that’s a whole different subject! :thinking:

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I admit I don’t often listen to Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, but I reckon it’s pretty good. I’m a bit wary of CD remasters though, as they tend to want to make their mark and “improve” what they should leave well alone and doesn’t need fixing.

Recent case in point; Tears For Fears splendid Seeds of Love. A mate who was a studio tech at the time (and tells tales of their running all the digital multitrack machines they could get their hands on and still running short of tracks despite two 24 track Sonys and two 32 track Mitsubishis all synched together…) anyway he obviously had to buy the new box set surround mix and all the trimmings.

But he was disappointed. The set includes the “original CD”. He compared it to the actual original CD from 1989. Not the same. Loading the two discs up on Audacity he compared the waveforms. Definitely not the same. The new disc is pretty heavily compressed. It sounds loud all the time. So there are places where in the original there’s a crescendo* but in the new version it can’t get any louder so it just falls a bit flat. Very disappointing and not at all untypical.

*That bit in the middle of Sowing The Seeds Of Love where there’s a kind of fugue that goes into Sgt-Pepper-ish brass which should arrive with a crescendo. Yeah. That bit. Thrilling in the original. Flat as a pancake in the new “original”.

I’m not tech-savvy regarding CD remasters, but have heard of the term “Loudness Wars”… I was given a copy of Nirvana’s Nevermind remaster and it sounds like my hi-fi from decades ago when the amplifier had a loudness button…!

I’ve just lit :fire: the fire and bringing the oil up to boiling, you heretic. :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

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Agree on the White Album but also London Calling by The Clash, the title track’s good and so is Brand New Cadillac which is a cover. Maybe I should try it again.

Tubular Bells - Mike Oldfield…

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I may be an old fart but am I alone in listening to music from the 21st century as well as earlier stuff? Or was it only old stuff which was overrated ? Anyroad , mention of Tarkus had me shuddering at the near forgotten memory of the pretentious drivel spouted by ELP and Yes at their ludicrous peak . But overrated- did anybody really rate nonsense like Tales from Topographic Oceans in the first place ?

So…old stuff - Layla by a country mile , the most disappointing album I have ever heard .
New stuff … probably Charlotte Gainsbourg’s last album, Rest from 2017. The single sounded extraordinarily good but the album - so so .

4 Seasons by Nige

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Rust Never Sleeps by Neil Young. The CD version has the worst sound quality I’ve ever heard for a commercial recording.
On the other hand, his Weld album is brilliant.
BTW a huge thumbs up from me for The Dark Side of the Moon!

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Any Radiohead album.

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Worst for sound quality for me was a greatest hits album by Lindisfarne.
My theory was that to get so many tracks on the vinyl, they compressed the bass.
Their sound man, whose brother was in the band, lives locally and his wife used to work with mine.
I mentioned this to him and he took it personally even though I was at pains to point out that I knew it was nothing to do with him and that the sound quality on their “own” albums like Meet me on the Corner is brilliant.
He barely spoke to me after that.

No, not alone, I like and listen to loads of current artists, inc Florence atm, Dua Lipa, Dermot Kennedy, London Grammar, Bishop Briggs, the list goes on. One of the reasons I questioned the Bose in the RF is that I like music in cars, and through my AirPod pro’s, which imho are the best earphones ever.
As to the most overrated album/artist, and this could be controversial, imo it’s pretty much everything by…The Beatles.

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Rick Wakeman obviously didn’t, he left “Yes” because of it!

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I think “Nige” was over-rated period! He was the “darling” of the British Classical scene as much for his “Punk” image with his Johnny Rotten hair-do and his (over-emphasised) accent, as anything else.

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