Albums that have no business being good.... but are.

[jammindude]

I find Blaze's voice to be bland and monotone and can't listen to either of these albums.

+1

  , at least as regards TXF.  I find moments on Virtual XI that I like a lot; I actually dig The Angel And The Gambler.

If you like that song, you’re gonna love this...

https://youtu.be/CF9Z_wnmnc4

[King Postwhore]

Consolers of the Lonely - The Raconteurs

Jack White in White Stripes - Can't Stand.

Jack White in Raconteurs - I love.

[jammindude]

I’m probably going to be in the minority here, but I’m going to go ahead and throw The X Factor on the pile.

Everything leading up to that album should’ve made it a complete stinkbomb. But it actually turned out very very well. They would wait one more album for the stinkbomb. 😝

Please people, don’t put those two albums in the same league. TXF is a criminally underrated gem, and VXI is a turd. To call it a beer coaster would be in insult to beer coasters.

I agree that The X Factor was decent and Virtual XI is terrible (The Clansman aside). I wasn’t a big follower of Maiden at the time but why would you think it was going to be a stinkbomb? They have been pretty consistent over the years.

I just saw this.

I don’t think Iron Maiden  has been that consistent. Most of their albums have been at least passable, but VXI and NPFTD in particular are just poor albums to me. And VXI is just plain bad. I still find it hard to believe that everyone was sitting in the control room during the mixing of several of those songs and no one had the balls to just look over at Steve’s and say, “ hey, don’t you think you’re taking this repetition thing a little too far?“

Parts of it are like Chinese water torture

[Stadler]

I find Blaze's voice to be bland and monotone and can't listen to either of these albums.

+1

  , at least as regards TXF.  I find moments on Virtual XI that I like a lot; I actually dig The Angel And The Gambler.

If you like that song, you’re gonna love this...

https://youtu.be/CF9Z_wnmnc4

I think you exaggerate.   

[jammindude]

 

[IDontNotDoThings]

I will always defend the Blaze-era Iron Maiden albums. Blaze has such raw power in his vocals on The X Factor & it makes the music quite cathartic. On Virtual XI, his vocals have a lot more dynamics which I think serves the songs well. The production on both albums is quite raw, which I understand might be a turn-off for some people, but I find that it has a certain charm that's quite endearing. Musically, the material on both albums isn't all that different from the reunion-era albums that seem to get far more respect among the Maiden fanbase, which I've always found a bit confusing, but oh well.

I also have a bit of a personal connection with many of the songs on those albums - especially The Unbeliever.

Oh yeah, & repetition aside, I think The Angel & The Gambler is great.

[Peter Mc]

I’m probably going to be in the minority here, but I’m going to go ahead and throw The X Factor on the pile.

Everything leading up to that album should’ve made it a complete stinkbomb. But it actually turned out very very well. They would wait one more album for the stinkbomb. 😝

Please people, don’t put those two albums in the same league. TXF is a criminally underrated gem, and VXI is a turd. To call it a beer coaster would be in insult to beer coasters.

I agree that The X Factor was decent and Virtual XI is terrible (The Clansman aside). I wasn’t a big follower of Maiden at the time but why would you think it was going to be a stinkbomb? They have been pretty consistent over the years.

I just saw this.

I don’t think Iron Maiden  has been that consistent. Most of their albums have been at least passable, but VXI and NPFTD in particular are just poor albums to me. And VXI is just plain bad. I still find it hard to believe that everyone was sitting in the control room during the mixing of several of those songs and no one had the balls to just look over at Steve’s and say, “ hey, don’t you think you’re taking this repetition thing a little too far?“

Parts of it are like Chinese water torture

I totally agree that NPFTD and VXL pretty much stink but, considering how many album's they’ve put out, I’d still say only 2 bad albums shows some consistency.  I wasn’t really trying to argue though, was just genuinely curious why you expected X Factor to be terrible.  Just because Bruce had gone or was there more to it than that.

Getting back to the subject of albums being better than they had any right to be, I’m going to throw in Keep The Faith by Bon Jovi.  They don’t entirely fit the premise of the thread as they had made pretty uniformly good albums to that point.  For me it was more the issue that they hadn’t released an album in 4 years, the two main guys in the band (Bon Jovi and Sambora) had clearly fallen out in that time and I didn’t know if they could get back on the same page.  Added to that, the musical landscape had massively shifted away from 80’s pop rock with the arrival of Guns N Roses and then the onset of grunge.  Bon Jovi’s contemporaries like Def Leppard, Motley Crue, Poison etc. were falling by the wayside in terms of their popularity plummeting and Bon Jovi had to semi reinvent themselves to stay relevant.  It had become very uncool to like bands like Bon Jovi. The album they put out didn’t just keep them relevant, they went from strength to strength, catapulting them from an arena act to a stadium act. Songs like the title track and Dry County showed a maturity they’d never shown before.  With the challenges they had at the time, I think it’s a pretty remarkable achievement that they managed to reinvent themselves and stay one of the biggest bands in the world.

[jammindude]

Pretty much what you said. They had been on a downturn for a couple of albums (most fans regard NPFTD and FOTD rather low) and then Bruce seemingly irreplaceable. Things didn’t look good.

[wolfking]

I won't get into the Maiden debate.  I think every album is good to amazing.

[MirrorMask]

Getting back to the subject of albums being better than they had any right to be, I’m going to throw in Keep The Faith by Bon Jovi.  They don’t entirely fit the premise of the thread as they had made pretty uniformly good albums to that point.  For me it was more the issue that they hadn’t released an album in 4 years, the two main guys in the band (Bon Jovi and Sambora) had clearly fallen out in that time and I didn’t know if they could get back on the same page.  Added to that, the musical landscape had massively shifted away from 80’s pop rock with the arrival of Guns N Roses and then the onset of grunge.  Bon Jovi’s contemporaries like Def Leppard, Motley Crue, Poison etc. were falling by the wayside in terms of their popularity plummeting and Bon Jovi had to semi reinvent themselves to stay relevant.  It had become very uncool to like bands like Bon Jovi. The album they put out didn’t just keep them relevant, they went from strength to strength, catapulting them from an arena act to a stadium act. Songs like the title track and Dry County showed a maturity they’d never shown before.  With the challenges they had at the time, I think it’s a pretty remarkable achievement that they managed to reinvent themselves and stay one of the biggest bands in the world.

Keep the Faith is my favorite Bon Jovi album and Dry County is my favorite Bon Jovi song. Yeah, yeah, Slippery when Wet and New Jersey is where is at and I'm not gonna dispute that, but Keep the Faith is an amazing album and will always be my favorite album from them. Kinda like, to make an apple and orange comparison, Metallica: praise all you want Master of Puppets, I'm not gonna stop you or tell you you're wrong. Still, I prefer Ride the Lightning.

[Zantera]

Blaze is the easy scapegoat for those albums not being classics but I think it's a tad unfair and anyone who can look at it with a bit of a neutral view will see that Maiden were in a pretty rough shape before Blaze joined. I always felt that's why both Adrian and Bruce jumped ship to begin with, Adrian after they decided to return to a more "simple" sound after Seventh Son and Bruce just seemed to have more fun with his solo stuff at the time, which honestly felt more fresh than anything Maiden were doing. (And his solo output through the 90s kinda puts Maiden's 90s to shame)

I think honestly the only reason fans in general seem to go a bit easier on No Prayer and Fear of the Dark than X-Factor and Virtual XI is that those albums still had Bruce - the voice of Maiden.

[wolfking]

I'll add a few in;

Accept - Blood of the Nations - Comeback album after 14 years without UDO.  Hmm.....absolute cracker and started a new brilliant era for the band.

Black Sabbath - Born Again - They nailed the Ozzy replacement, but replacing Dio with Deep Purple singer Ian Gillan?  Wut?  Yep, but this album smokes, Gillan tears it up and some heavy heavy moments.

Edguy - Space Police - The band were on a bit of a downward spiral with the couple before and Avantasia were well overtaking them in popularity and focus for Tobi.  This one was set up to be another stinker but it's really really excellent.

King Diamond - Abigail 2 - Really, you can't follow up this album.  While it's a completely different beast and doesn't hold a candle to the original, it's a grower and a really excellent King Diamond album.  It's a worthy enough follow up.

Live - The Turn - The band return without Ed, but a singer that sounds exactly like him.  No one gave a shit about the band at this time, and it showed as this lineup bombed, but fuck this is a cracker of an album.  Great hard rock record, love it.

Rush - Signals - The band turn to the times and it should have flopped but it produced my favourite run of Rush records.  What an era, they fucking nailed it.

Soilwork - The Living Infinite - Peter leaves the band again.  This time would have cracked a band but in comes Andersson and brings new life to the band.  While I prefer The Ride Majestic, this double album was a pleasant surprise on its release.

[Peter Mc]

Getting back to the subject of albums being better than they had any right to be, I’m going to throw in Keep The Faith by Bon Jovi.  They don’t entirely fit the premise of the thread as they had made pretty uniformly good albums to that point.  For me it was more the issue that they hadn’t released an album in 4 years, the two main guys in the band (Bon Jovi and Sambora) had clearly fallen out in that time and I didn’t know if they could get back on the same page.  Added to that, the musical landscape had massively shifted away from 80’s pop rock with the arrival of Guns N Roses and then the onset of grunge.  Bon Jovi’s contemporaries like Def Leppard, Motley Crue, Poison etc. were falling by the wayside in terms of their popularity plummeting and Bon Jovi had to semi reinvent themselves to stay relevant.  It had become very uncool to like bands like Bon Jovi. The album they put out didn’t just keep them relevant, they went from strength to strength, catapulting them from an arena act to a stadium act. Songs like the title track and Dry County showed a maturity they’d never shown before.  With the challenges they had at the time, I think it’s a pretty remarkable achievement that they managed to reinvent themselves and stay one of the biggest bands in the world.

Keep the Faith is my favorite Bon Jovi album and Dry County is my favorite Bon Jovi song. Yeah, yeah, Slippery when Wet and New Jersey is where is at and I'm not gonna dispute that, but Keep the Faith is an amazing album and will always be my favorite album from them. Kinda like, to make an apple and orange comparison, Metallica: praise all you want Master of Puppets, I'm not gonna stop you or tell you you're wrong. Still, I prefer Ride the Lightning.

Just for pure consistency, I will always go for New Jersey as their best album and Wanted Dead Or Alive will always be my favourite song (it’s my favourite song in music history by any artist).  Keep The Faith though is a really great record and, yeah, Dry County is the song I would probably play to someone who said Bon Jovi are just a hair metal band. It’s one of their absolute best and the solo is undoubtedly Richie Sambora’s finest moment, one of my all time favourite guitar solos.  There are a couple of songs that let it down though and stop it from overtaking New Jersey.

[TAC]

New Jersey is amazing!

[Lowdz]

Blaze is the easy scapegoat for those albums not being classics but I think it's a tad unfair and anyone who can look at it with a bit of a neutral view will see that Maiden were in a pretty rough shape before Blaze joined. I always felt that's why both Adrian and Bruce jumped ship to begin with, Adrian after they decided to return to a more "simple" sound after Seventh Son and Bruce just seemed to have more fun with his solo stuff at the time, which honestly felt more fresh than anything Maiden were doing. (And his solo output through the 90s kinda puts Maiden's 90s to shame)

I think honestly the only reason fans in general seem to go a bit easier on No Prayer and Fear of the Dark than X-Factor and Virtual XI is that those albums still had Bruce - the voice of Maiden.

That may be true, but uninspired albums will sound better with Bruce singing than Blaze. Thoise were poor albums, save for the odd good song. And Maiden lost me after Seventh Son - I'd not loved SiT and SS, so FotD and NPFTD killed them to me. I still don't own XF but did try VXI.

[Peter Mc]

Apex by Unleash The Archers is one for me in that it literally came out of nowhere from a band I previously thought had very little going for them.  Suddenly to my huge surprise they put out one of my favourite metal albums of the past 5-10 years. Love that album and literally have no idea how they managed it based on their earlier material.

[jammindude]

Blaze is the easy scapegoat for those albums not being classics but I think it's a tad unfair and anyone who can look at it with a bit of a neutral view will see that Maiden were in a pretty rough shape before Blaze joined. I always felt that's why both Adrian and Bruce jumped ship to begin with, Adrian after they decided to return to a more "simple" sound after Seventh Son and Bruce just seemed to have more fun with his solo stuff at the time, which honestly felt more fresh than anything Maiden were doing. (And his solo output through the 90s kinda puts Maiden's 90s to shame)

I think honestly the only reason fans in general seem to go a bit easier on No Prayer and Fear of the Dark than X-Factor and Virtual XI is that those albums still had Bruce - the voice of Maiden.

That may be true, but uninspired albums will sound better with Bruce singing than Blaze. Thoise were poor albums, save for the odd good song. And Maiden lost me after Seventh Son - I'd not loved SiT and SS, so FotD and NPFTD killed them to me. I still don't own XF but did try VXI.

I’m sorry, but you tried the wrong one. Those albums are not equals.

[OpenYourEyes311]

Probably on my own with this one, I absolutely love Calling All Stations by Genesis.

It totally shouldn't work, considering the HUGE loss of vocalist, drummer, and songwriter Phil Collins the year prior. But man, the album does it for me. It introduced me to Ray Wilson as a vocalist and songwriter, whom I've started to follow on his solo work. There's such a darkness to his voice, as well as the music that Tony and Mike play with him. The opening track is a banger, the singles are great, and there's a few toward the end that would be classics if they had been recorded with Pete or Phil (The Dividing Line is very 'Domino'-esque.) I think it helped that I got into Genesis after the box sets came out in 2008, and I decided to go from last to first, so I didn't have anything but radio songs to compare CAS to when I first heard it. Also, shout out to NDV who drums on a couple songs (another person I didn't know at the time, but have come to really love his work.)

[HOF]

Probably on my own with this one, I absolutely love Calling All Stations by Genesis.

It totally shouldn't work, considering the HUGE loss of vocalist, drummer, and songwriter Phil Collins the year prior. But man, the album does it for me. It introduced me to Ray Wilson as a vocalist and songwriter, whom I've started to follow on his solo work. There's such a darkness to his voice, as well as the music that Tony and Mike play with him. The opening track is a banger, the singles are great, and there's a few toward the end that would be classics if they had been recorded with Pete or Phil (The Dividing Line is very 'Domino'-esque.) I think it helped that I got into Genesis after the box sets came out in 2008, and I decided to go from last to first, so I didn't have anything but radio songs to compare CAS to when I first heard it. Also, shout out to NDV who drums on a couple songs (another person I didn't know at the time, but have come to really love his work.)

I really like most of CAS as well. There’s a few clunkers that I wish they had reconsidered putting on the album, and I don’t think Ray Wilson was necessarily the best of all the available choices for singer, but he did a fine job.

[Zydar]

Apparently the position as a singer stood between him and David Longdon from Big Big Train. David sounds quite a lot like Peter Gabriel (to me anyway), so that could have been a fine choice too.

[HOF]

Apparently the position as a singer stood between him and David Longdon from Big Big Train. David sounds quite a lot like Peter Gabriel (to me anyway), so that could have been a fine choice too.

Yep, Longdon would have been an outstanding choice. Supposedly Kevin Gilbert might have gotten a chance if not for his untimely death. It’s too bad Nick wasn’t considered for the singer role as well. I was just listening to a podcast the other where he mentioned Tony Banks years later remarking “Why didn’t you tell me you could sing?” or something along those lines, and Nick was basically like “you didn’t ask and you had already picked a singer so what was I gonna say?”

[Stadler]

Funny, because no knock on Nick - I know he's well loved around here, and from what I've heard, deservedly so - but the big gap for me on that record was not having Phil's drums.   I am a HUGE Phil Collins (as drummer) fan, he's on my drumming Mt. Rushmore, and that's always been the glue for me for that band.   I'm not saying Nick and Nir didn't do a good job, but I think that's one place where for me, it lost connectivity.  I LIKE the record, I just have a hard time thinking of it as a "Genesis" record.

[HOF]

Funny, because no knock on Nick - I know he's well loved around here, and from what I've heard, deservedly so - but the big gap for me on that record was not having Phil's drums.   I am a HUGE Phil Collins (as drummer) fan, he's on my drumming Mt. Rushmore, and that's always been the glue for me for that band.   I'm not saying Nick and Nir didn't do a good job, but I think that's one place where for me, it lost connectivity.  I LIKE the record, I just have a hard time thinking of it as a "Genesis" record.

I would agree Nick’s contributions to CAS were minimal. They gave the lion’s share and more of the heavy drum moments to Nir, which I though he carried well (The Dividing Line, There Must Be Some Other Way for instance). Nick did the first half of Alien Afternoon which was just a slow groove (with Nir getting the livelier second half), then Small Talk which just wasn’t much of a song so the drums are pretty inconsequential. The other track Nick plays on, Uncertain Weather, is one of my favorites on the album and more of a classic Genesis tune. It’s the only time Nick got to do much on the album really.

But I don’t know that Tony and Mike wanted the drums to be too PC-ish either. Which is too bad because Nick does a great PC impression if you listen to his performance of The Lamb with Giraffe/Kevin Gilbert, and he also channels him heavily in Big Big Train.

I still think with CAS they fell in between trying to continue the legacy of Genesis or start something new that could really stand on its own as the next era of Genesis. Felt like ultimately they should have made it a different group altogether, but I’m sure they needed the name for marketing purposes.