Underrated Albums | Page 3 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

Nico’s Chelsea Girl is a very underrated album in my opinion. The songwriting (which boasts pieces by Lou Reed, John Cale and Jackson Browne as well as Nico’s first writing efforts) is very ahead of its time, particularly on the sublime These Days which is a gorgeous, melancholic track. I love the lo-fi quality of the guitar and the deadpan vocals against the very sweet string arrangements and melodies. I like her later works too, like Desertshore and the Marble Index, but Chelsea Girl is my favourite. 

Great post, @Ron Nasty . I’ll try and check it out. 

I’ll do a similar thing for one of my favourite albums from last year, Wide Awake by Parquet Courts. I think @Von Bontee might like this one. It’s sort of art-punk and post-punk, with amazing lyrics tackling a lot of social issues in a very eloquent and nuanced way. 

Here’s the first track, Total Football. The bass playing on this one is absolutely stunning. 

I couldn’t find the studio versions of the other tracks I wanted to demonstrate on YouTube, so here’s the live versions. The first is ‘Before The Water Gets Too High’, which is a pretty chilling song about climate change, the second is “Freebird II”, and the other is my personal favourite, which has my favourite lyrics on the whole album.

We’ve come to replace your clock’s old stubborn hands
We are the answer to why they never had a chance
It was not so long ago that the world was mostly slow
The age of iron, steam and speed
Turned a stroll to a stampede

But we’ve come to increase time in between ticks
And there is romance in the slow dances
‘Cause they’re fertile in hush, futile in haste
These are your nerves, this is how they taste

Well I can’t count how many times I’ve been outdone by nihilism
Joined the march that splits an open heart into a schism
I cower at the thought of other people’s expectations
And yet still hand over mine to them

Travel where you are, tourism is sin
These are the ruins we left behind, you can’t take pictures of them
If what they say is true, then you become what you chew
If it decays spit it out, affectation is a drought

Nothing reminds the mind of power like the cheap odor of plastic
Leaking fumes we crave, consume, the rush it feels fantastic
But like power turns to mold, like a junkie going cold
I need the fix of a little tenderness

I feel compelled to resuscitate this thread in order to heap praises on one of the most underrated bands of all time, the Japanese band Fishmans. In particular I’m talking about their final album, a live album called 98.12.28 Otokotachi no Wakare . This was their final live performance ever, released before the bassist left and the singer, Shinji Sato, passed away from heart problems.

I consider it to be the best live album I’ve ever heard, right up there with Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense, Coltrane’s Concert in Japan and Zeppelin’s The Song Remains The Same. It’s just one of those live performances where it’s so transcendently amazing and uplifting you just get lost in the sound.

It is a rare final album (see also: Abbey Road , Talk Talk’s Laughing Stock, Bowie’s Blackstar) in that it is basically the culmination of the artist’s entire career. The sounds explored across all seven of the band’s previous studio albums (dream pop, dub, reggae, rock, post-rock, progressive pop, ambient) are present here, and if you listen to it as the culmination of what they’d done before it’s enough to move you to tears.

For the guitar enthusiasts on the forum, this album contains some of the most mindblowingly great playing I’ve ever heard. It’s rarely all that complex, but the tones and textures creating by the guitars on here are just unbelievable. They range from funky and tight to spacey and reverb-y. It also contains an extended version of their album Long Season in its entirety, spanning to 41 minutes long, which is just incomparable. 

Also, on the website Rate Your Music this has an average score of 4.36/5, which is higher than all the album’s in RYM’s top 10, which have the advantage of having far more ratings and so are correspondingly higher. The reason for this is that in the last couple of years the band has acquired a small but passionate fanbase online, even though the band has been broken up for twenty years and has mostly languished in obscurity till this point.

So yeah, go out and listen to this thing. It really is one of the greatest things I’ve ever heard. 

13th Floor Elevators were a really cool band with an awesome name.  

As for another underrated album, I’m going to showcase a hip-hop album this time, Digable Planet’s Reachin’ (A New Refutation of Time and Space).

In the early 90s there were a whole bunch of hip-hop acts who made a much gentler, quirkier form of music than the aggressive gangsta rap that was popular at the time. They basically fused laid back, groovy beats laden with samples from classic jazz recordings with witty, playful and more thoughtful lyricism that instead of being loaded with slurs and threats was more focused on issues that you don’t often hear covered in hip-hop music. For example, on A Tribe Called Quest’s The Low End Theory (probably the most enduring and acclaimed album of this style), there are songs that tackle date rape and the unfair treatment of artists by the music industry.

Digable Planets are probably the most perfect and talented example of this style, yet for some reason they seem to be mostly forgotten in comparison to A Tribe Called Quest and De La Soul other than their two hits (Rebirth of Slick and Where I’m From). In the liner notes for this album, one of the members talks about how they were definitely a band for hipsters by hipsters – they called each other “cats” and name dropped jazz artists from half a century prior, like Max Roach and Mingus. On this album, the beats are mostly made up of jazz samples, but on the follow up, the equally amazing Blowout Comb, they actually used live jazz instrumentation in the studio. The music is really vibrant, upbeat and groovy – I’ve never been to New York City, but it’s exactly what I imagine the streets of that place feel like. The lyrics are just excellent, and they tackle some pretty tough issues, including abortion:

“The fascists are some heavy dudes
They don’t really give a damn about life
They just don’t want a woman to control her body
Or have the right to choose”

Like, damn. That’s about as political they get on here, though – most of the lyrics are a fun and witty description of being young and hip in an exciting city. 

If you are a hip-hop fan, then you will likely love this as to me it brings together every quality about the genre that I like. If you’re not a hip-hop fan, then maybe give this a try, particularly if your gripes with the genre are its aggressiveness and often misogynistic attitudes, since this is completely different to what you might find on an NWA album. 

Here’s an underrated album – it’s by Korean band (artist?) Mid Air Thief and is called Crumbling, and it came out in 2018. It’s a pretty awesome mixture of folk and psychedelia. 

Good to see some recognition of Chance on the forum, don’t think he’s been mentioned before.