Underrated Albums | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

Maroon 5’s Songs About Jane.

While most of us know them as a shitty overrated pop sellouts who create terrible music, their debut album is really awesome, mixing pop rock with elements of funk and soul to create a really unique sound. It’s a real shame they let fame get to their heads and destroy the quality of their music.

I’d especially recommend This Love and Shiver.

50yearslate said
You really like making those charts, don’t you 😉

  

It’s addictive

PurplishRain said
I love seeing S.F. Sorrow on the list. Now that is an underrated album. 

  

For sure. I believe it beat Tommy by a few months as the first rock opera, and is far better in my opinion. It’s a crime that ‘Bracelets of Fingers’ isn’t held up with the very best tracks of the psychedelic era.

Beatlebug said

@QuarryMan, I loved seeing The ArchAndroid on your chart. It’s a terrific piece of work.   

Isn’t it great? I love Afrofuturism as an artistic concept, I get the feeling Monae’s work inspired the Black Panther movie in some ways. Her last album was really great too. 

Von Bontee said
Lotsa great albums mentioned on this thread so far, specially on Qman’s chart…

…but, as Beatlebug did with the ’70s Bowie masterpieces she mentioned, I take issue with the notion that many of these are *overrated*, as opposed to merely being underknown by the larger public. Like, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a non-five-star review of that third Velvets album, or of the NY Dolls or those Big Star albums. I guess. And yet I don’t think either of those four have sold even 100,000 copies after nearly a half-century of availability (actually much less, since they were out of print for much of that time). Which means that they’ve *technically* been underrated by MILLIONS who have never even had the opportunity to hear (of) them! From a certain point of view…

On the other hand, the bulk of jazz purists certainly hated Miles’ “On The Corner” in 1972, however much it’s now considered a visionary masterpiece, way ahead of its time. So I guess critical consensus being in flux and all that, and critical tastes often differing from popularity, blah blah blah…I really don’t know what I’m ineptly trying to say here, other than “‘overrated’ is a bit of a nebulous concept”. And that I always love seeing evidence of overlap in between my personal collection and those of other pudlians. (Pharoah Sanders, woo!)

  

I think the reason I included the third VU album is simply to get it some attention over the clamour of people expressing their love for the banana album. I think all four albums are great, but the songwriting on the third one is so affecting that it deserves more recognition than it gets. Not to mention they still haven’t sold nearly as many records as they deserve to. 

I think it comes down to making a distinction between critically underrating something and commercially underrating it, but I guess the ones I listed are a mixture of both. I can see why critics hated On The Corner, given how far it was from jazz, but I think Big Star in particular is the one that most stings, given how much commercial appeal they had. “Thirteen”, “In The Street” (which @PurplishRain may know as the theme from That 70s Show) “September Gurls” and “The Ballad of El Goodo” are all such amazing pop songs that deserved to chart well.