Which "blind"buy do you regret and which one not

Hi Guy

Trick of the Tail, TMR & Pet Sounds???  I really cannot comment on these, never heard any of them that I am aware of. However, Grace is definitely un-listenable to IMHO, it is so terrible that I can’t bring myself to play it long enough to find the one track I bought it for, I would rip it if I could.

Now, what’s wrong with Dire Straits? Or are you thinking of some other band perhaps.

Life’s too short to dwell on the bad, we have you to thank for reminding us of several great performers in past posts such as Sandy Denny & Ian [Iain] Matthews and such Albums as Plainsong & The Traveling Wilburys, all great stuff.

Peter

Have to agree with this choice. I'm a big (middle-aged)TF fan, but this is very poor.

Not a big fan of Genesis, Zappa, Dire Straits, Bauhaus, Cabaret Voltaire etc (i.e. all the forum favourites, allegedly!) either but I wouldn't say they were in the same ball park as TMR. To me it sounds like all your most cherished blues albums being fed into a combine harvester by the Wurzels on acid - this is not a good thing!

Can't agree with Grace and Pet Sounds though.............. Still, it's what makes the world go round.

Vlad

PS See "The Sound and The Fury" on BBC4 at 9pm tonight - there's bound to be something on there to raise the hackles still further.

And yet I find Astral Weeks soothing, seeking and spiritual................... There's no pleasing some folks!

I might yet give into temptation and post a list of "10 albums everyone should have"..........

Vlad

Vlad, what you found "soothing" I found weedy; what you describe as "seeking" I found musically conservative and self-indulgent; and what you found to be "spiritual" I found to be empty and sanctimonious.

It's all down to personal taste, innit.

No such thing as "albums everyone should own". There might be plenty of albums that one owes to oneself to at least hear, but none that people should be told to spend their money on.

Except "Tago Mago" by Can, of course.

Of course. Except that when I'm made the new Pope, I know what's going on the Prohibited list

That's OK then Vlad, I'm a Zoroastrian (this week anyway), so I don't give a Hail Mary what the Pontiff says

I like Astral Weeks too ... 

Still i'm totally confused now as i simply thought it was a given that every Naim user loved Bauhaus. I thought it just went with the territory as the Naim sound is quite gothic. I'm sure i've read that folks prefer Naim kit because it sounds more gothic (or was it more analogue? no, I'm sure it was gothic). 

Peter

You are of course right and I should be accentuating the positive and for me that will always be folk music with Sandy and Shirley as the leading lights and HMHB, Chumbawamba, Karine Polwart, Bellowhead and Show of Hands leading the genre today. 

But this thread by its very nature encourages negativity and i, alas, have fallen into the trap. I feel the gravity has failed me and negativity won't pull me through. So I need to leave Rue Morgue Avenue and embrace positivity. 

Sorry, but DS always remind me of HiFi show, which is surely why Linn naimed its streamers after them and our friends from Salisbury followed suit. It all sounds the same to me. I agree well played, but .... 

POSITIVE

I bought One Nation Underground by Pearls Before Swine on the basis of the NME book of rock explaining Tom Rapp beat Bob Dylan in a talent show. I subsequently bought all the Tom Rapp/PBS albums without hearing them before parting with the cash. These are fantastic albums full of great songs and arrangements if you ignore Tom's slight lisp. His very short second album Balaklava is stunning in that Suzanne, his cover of Len Cohen's fine track, is the weakest composition on the entire album. No slight on Len, he's the dog's, but more an expression of just how good a song smith Mr R was. I say was because TR released an album a few year's back and it was not up to the standard of his 60s/70s work. 

Tom Rapp even wrote one track with the lyrics in morse code And he wrote a Frog song long before Macca ... And if his answer is not the best, then it is still so much better than all of the rest.

All the best, Guy  

Guy, you know me, I'm prepared to indulge you most of the time, but now you've gone too far.

Chumbawumba! Really!

What a weird coincidence. I first heard of PBS in 1977, by reading "The NME Book of Rock" too. They sounded really interesting, but I wasn't able to hear them, as they were never played on the radio; and all their albums had been deleted by then.

Many, many years later I bought a CD reissue of some of Rapp's classic ESP Disk recordings and I loved them... very singular music.

On a more positive note, then.

I've had more success listening to my fellow forum members' recommendations than from all the critics put together in my almost 45+ years of serious interest in recorded music. And I've only been a member for 6 months!

Among the great finds for me have been in areas of music of which I knew/know little, including, off the top of my head:

Karine Polwart (I've four of her albums now - all wonderful), 2 versions of Pergolesi's Stabat Mater, Crooked Still, Shostakovich (very recently!), some wonderful recordings on the Alpha label, Wagner's ring cycle (OK, the jury's still out on that!), Vox Lumninis and, beleive it or not, Porcupine Tree!

So for me, it's:

Critics/Daft Lists 0 vs Forum Members Wanderers ∞ (Infinity)

Keep opining those opinions, folks!

Vlad

Hi Vlad,

Would agree with you, I also made some interesting discoveries. So I am still awaiting more replies to the post to even get some more pleasant surprises.

Hello Kevin

Have you listened to their folk albums like English Rebel Songs .. it is not all Tubthumping that was an unrepresntative one off ... If you have fair enough, if not worth a listen you may be surprised

All the best, Guy 

Hi Guy

I used to have a mate who worked at One Little Indian records, who used to force the band's recordings for both that label and Agit Prop on me at every opportunities. I absolutely hated them (the records), and found the band's mixture of strident "wackiness" and student politics deeply objectionable.

Sorry!

I'vebought so many random albums that its a bot hard to single out one album that made me think, why did I waste my cash on this, so here are two that I regretted:

Bought and was so underwhelmed that I gave it away.  I also found that I just could not get into this one either

At teh risk of getting linched , I really do like Porcupine Tree. I was also really pleased with Moon Madness by Camel and Ghost Revelry by Opeth

I had this morning another example for this category. Raving reviews and some small good samples I thought I heard and then this mroning I heard it again and was very dissapointed about the album:

Ditto on that one, I bought the album and thought what a load of nothing. I was also unmoved by Mankind th Crafty Ape.