Records you truly love in spite of genuinely awful sound

Stereolab - Peng!

great album, doesn't sound too good

 

KISS - Hotter Than Hell
Wings - Venus and Mars (much too compressed)

 

Same goes with early Genesis at Trident Studios - Bowie and Genesis simply were lacking a competent production team, I'd imagine. None of their work up to the 1980s sounds spectacular by any means.

 

I think Genesis found their footing in the Gabriel era with SEBTP, and things sounded solid up through ATOTT. But Wind and Three were *murky* as all get out. Duke was an improvement (drums especially), but their sound quality didn't get back on track until they built their own dedicated studio and got Hugh Padgham working the desk.

 

One particular problem must have been the lengths of the albums - Duke clocks in at 54 minutes crammed onto a single disc! Their first truly great-sounding album was Invisible Touch in my book

 

Lots of concurrence in this thread - "Raw Power" and the Five's "Back in the USA" were the first two albums I thought of when I saw the title.

There's always been a lot of grousing about the Cream catalog's production values, but the last two studio albums are definitely better than the first two.

Don't know what happened to AC/DC's "Fly on the Wall", but it sounds like Cliff didn't bother to show up for the sessions. The bass is non-existent.

My only new offering is Manfred Mann's "Get Your Rocks Off". Muddy and poorly mixed. Chris Slade's drums are completely buried.

 

I always thought "Follow You, Follow Me" was a lovely-sounding track in the early-'80s. That came off And Then There Were Three, IIRC.

Genesis sort of inherited the sound of Collins and his big solo breathru Face Value, didn't they, on their subsequent Abacab.

Of course, Collins got some of his sound I always thought from Peter Gabriel. That killer gated drum sound though that spread like kudzu thru '80s music was invented by accident when they were recording Gabriel's "Intruder" off his "melt" LP. The song was actually borne out of the sound, which they stumbled across. Gabriel then had Collins improvise a drum bit using that sound, and once he had something he liked he wrote "Intruder" around those drums. Collins then wanted to use it on "In The Air Tonight", which turned out to be a massive hit, and suddenly those compressed, gated drums were everywhere. Yeah, they probably got overused, but man were they awesome (and they're back big time in the past couple of years in pop).

Classic Drum Sounds: 'In The Air Tonight' | MusicRadar

I still think that bit where the drums kick in on "In The Air Tonight" is one of the greatest moments in pop.

 

Canadian “2-eye” sounds quite listenable.

 

Half of Fly On The Wall sounds like it’s been recorded in an empty hangar. One big reverb-fest. Especially the vocals suffer because of this problem. Other songs, like f.i. First Blood, sound like they were recorded at a seperate session and have much more in common with the sound on the predecessor Flick Of The Switch, which was also self-produced but sounds A LOT better.

I’ll mention Ozzy Osbourne’s Ozzmosis.

Much has been made about the album’s production issues. Ozzy wanted to keep No More Tears’ Michael Wagener on board, but halfway through the sessions the record company Epic brought in Michael Beinhorn, who couldn’t get along with Ozzy at all.
The resulting album sounds waaaaaaay too bright and lacks detail and punch.

Also, Thin Lizzy’s Shades Of A Blue Orphanage.

Truly weird sounding. Very smiley-faced and it lacks clarity, although it could be argued that it adds to the album’s somewhat vague, proggy atmosphere.

 

I friggin' hate No More Tears production and totally love Ozzmosis. Very cool keyboard sound, meaty drums and bass, absolutely fantastic.

 

You think New Values sounds bad?
I love the production but maybe it sounds a bit bright.

 

I saw someone mention VU & Nico earlier which I disagree with. It's a New York record. It has a dirty NY vibe. I think it adds to the ambiance of the album. A clean sounding VU & Nico would scrub away the magic IMHO.
Now, on to albums I love but were either recorded poorly, mixed bad, or mastered terribly. My first two are The Replacements' Tim & Pleased To Meet Me. The Music on these albums is amazing, bar none, but they are so weak sounding. It's like they set the mikes on half-volume and placed them as far away from the band as they could. Just terrible. I had so much hope back in 08 when they remastered their catalog but it fixed nothing. How is it that Let It Be was recorded on an indie and sounds great but they move to a major label and we get this crap? Whatever the problem is, I doubt it can be fixed or the remasters would have sounded better. Maybe I'm wrong and one day we'll heard these albums nice and loud like they were intended to be heard.
Next, about half of the Big Star catalog. Sure, some of of it sounds fine but about half is a muddy, murky mess; especially Third. Can this not be fixed? Maybe not but it'd be great if it could. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely adore every album I mentioned, I just wish they had better sound clarity. Well, I've wasted enough of your time. Carry on...

 

New Values has an amazing production.

 

Bathory - Hammerheart!

One big distortionfest, great album though. One of my favorites.

 

The Antlers - Hospice

Husker Du - New Day Rising
Iggy and the Stooges - Raw Power

 

Saying VU+N sounds bad is like saying Sgt. Pepper’s should’ve been recorded live. It’s supposed to sound that way. But it still counts. Personal preference thing.

 

Exactly

 

Hawkwind - Text of Festival - Master of the Universe

 

Do you really think it sounds awful? Listened to Cruelty and the Beast this morning and was amazed at how spacious the sound stage was; it was dripping with atmosphere. They would do well to try to recapture that sound.

 

In the aeroplane over the sea

 

Out of our Heads.
Is there a decent sounding version of this?

 

"Pleased to Meet Me" and "Third/Sister Lovers" have something else in common...

 

I have a particular fondness for the music of Cliff Edwards, mainly remembered these days as the voice of Jiminy Cricket but at one time a huge recording and movie star. Unfortunately, most of his recordings are on 78s and not all surviving examples are in especially good condition. Add to that the extremely uneven attempts to process and clean up the sound and it can make for a challenging listen. Worth it, though.

 

The Beatles - Live! at the Star-Club in Hamburg, Germany; 1962

Love the energy and the enthusiasm.

 

The Flaming Lips albums released in the early nineties onwards... what a waste of material.

The Dynamic Range Database page for Lips is 99% red