The Black Album
I grew to "like" it later. But seriously. The first Metallica album with several skip tracks. There are some really cool songs there, but it's over polished and when you consider lame tracks like Don't Tread on Me, the entire album is just OK.
Agree. Both the Black Album and Empire were part of the series of disappointing early 90s releases by the great bands of the 80s (Maiden's No Prayer for the Dying being the other that springs immediately to mind). This was like, "really? Metallica too?" It's still heavy, but "over polished" is right. "Enter Sandman" was such a childish song (I'm talking more musically than anything else). Just that one riff repeated over and over and over AND OVER.... Also too grungy for my taste. Seemed like a conscious effort to do something very different from AJFA, and then Metallica took that to the extreme with BloodCum and BloodPiss.
Empire
Pretty much the same thing. Remove the trash that is The Thin Line and One and Only and the album becomes instantly better. Not as great as their truly classic stuff, but still really good.
ftfy
Best I Can, Another Rainy Night, Resistance, Hand on Heart and Anybody Listening? are
really good to great songs. Jet City Woman and the title track are just average, and the rest of the album should have been left on the cutting room floor (the success of Silent Lucidity notwithstanding). That being said, virtually anything QR could have done would have been a bit of a disappointment in comparison to O:M.
And it's a bit obscure (and RJ's gonna hate on me for this), but Tales from Topographic Oceans.
I'm not sure even hardcore Yes fans would call Topographic Oceans a "must have" or a "classic." I love it, but it took a bit of effort, and I completely understand why even fans of 70s prog wouldn't like it and why it was panned at the time of its release.
WTF is OK Computer? Is that a classic album? A band? I’ve never heard of it.
WTF is OK Computer? Is that a classic album? A band? I’ve never heard of it.
I've heard
of OK Computer, but I'm not sure I've ever heard a single song from it (I'm looking at the track list, and none of the titles sound like anything I've ever heard. According to Wikipedia, this album has sold about 2.5 million copies in the U.S. (about on par with Bon Jovi's
Crush), but the Wikipedia article is longer than the articles for some U.S. presidents. I think maybe the only Radiohead song I've ever heard was "Creep," which I sought out about a year ago (for some reason I can't now remember) and thought it sucked hard.