Albums with only 2 or 3 good tracks
Reply #6 – 2011-10-31 09:18:27
I seem to recall thinking Pocket Full of Kryptonite had a pretty good ratio of tracks I liked, so I guess that is a taste issue. Mind you, I haven't heard it in years, as I only had it the cassette album and never digitised it. What I've noticed also is that the singles charts in all eras have also had a lot of terrible songs in them. I mean samey me-too attempts to have a hit in the current fashionable style, novelty singles and just pretty poor music that an artist's die-hard fans will queue to buy in the first week of release to help propel them into at least the lower reaches of the charts, which then get little airplay and fade away forever. There have also been numerous failed attempts by one-hit wonders to repeat that earlier hit, using the same kind of gimmicks, so you can just hear they're trying to do the same again using the same formula. I guess there are also hits that are based more on the video than the audio since the 1990s. Compilation albums based on an era or a genre, and greatest hits albums for an artist tend to reflect the filtering out of the crap, as do our memories (viewing the past through rose-tinted spectacles because we remember only the good, not the mediocre, and maybe a little of the terrible if it really affected us). If you ever hear one of those radio shows where they run through the chart of "this week in 19??", you may well remember long-forgotten mediocre singles that haven't seen the light of day in years, mainly because they didn't make the grade. I tend not to listen to those shows very often because the quality ratio isn't that high, especially for the 60s and early 70s where there's no nostalgia to help me. Sometimes it's good for a nostalgia kick if it ties in with formative memories of your youth and you can associate the song with the girl, or maybe an old friend or a place, or a fresher's disco (Ride On Time always does the latter for me, which usually gets me thinking about that place and that girl). Come to think of it, I don't think I own a copy of Ride On Time, but some songs are so implanted in my brain I don't need to.