My most over-rated:

The Rolling Stones - Exile On Main Street 

While it is a great album, there are definitely some fairly mediocre songs, and just look what the critics gave it! 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exile_on_Main_St." rel="nofollow - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exile_on_Main_St.

My most under-rated:

Genesis - Trespass

My favourite Genesis album (and possibly all-time prog album!) but so underrated! (along with various other albums)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trespass_%28album%29" rel="nofollow - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trespass_(album)

Also:

Pavlov's Dog - Pampered Menial

An obvious choice but I think it's an absolute masterpiece, and the album got so much criticism! There's only one on the link below, but you get the gist of it 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pampered_Menial" rel="nofollow - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pampered_Menial

 

The long cuts from 1970 to 1972 and 1973 got pasted by the press regularly, and it was considered by many to be over done and not musical, because it did not follow the top ten blues/song format that the corporate kissing magazines were supporting!

 

As such Yes, got a terrible licking for Tales from Topographic Oceans, and it was one of the best thigns ever written in rock music! Jethro Tull took just as much abuse for "A Passion Play" which is a prophetic work in terms of its analogies to the history of music and rock specially. And many others fell into the same thing to the point that everything had to be 4 minutes long, specially when the FM radio in America got bought out by the corporations that alread owned the music distribution circles.

 

A lot of the European scene got terribly pasted in the American press. England had a more interesting attitude about European music, but the hippocrisy never stopped. But Melody Maker one day even said that Tangerine Dream sounded like Washing machine music, and of course, that told you that they were stoned senseless, to the point that they did not even know what a washing machine sounded like! But we didn't give a sh*t, enough, to put those morons in their place! But the joke is on them ... their favorite kissypoo rock bands are not remembered and a lot of the other stuff they hated ... there it is!

 

It's one of the saddest and hippocritical things about life ... we never appreciate things HERE AND NOW ... we always love something else, and ignore our own children, and thus the arts for their day, never arrives! We're too damn selfish to even spend time understanding that and seeing things in a more historical vein. The 70's became the greed is good generation, and their kids, are the ones that picked up the progressive music where their parents left it off!

 

 

 

 

"Strange Days" is easily the best album The Doors made. "Waiting For The Sun" would have surpassed it had not the suits in studio interfered with it and wrecked it. The Doors were never the same band afterwards. LA Woman contains a good collection of songs but no thought went into working the songs into a cohesive whole.

got something of a battering at the time and even now is the main punch bag of ELP's back catalogue. It houses probably my favourite ELP track Pirates as well as some some exceptional 'fusion' music on Carl Palmer's side while Keith Emerson's Piano Concerto is an extremely respectable classical work . Perhaps Greg Lake's ballads are the contentious element of the album but lyrically (with help from Pete Sinfield) its a million miles away from Celine Dion and the like. Hallowed By Thy Name is is the stand out track on that side but even Closer To Believing is a lovely romantic song and not at all cheesy to me.

Admittedly I only gave it 3 stars and the solo side format of the album does pose a problem but some of the music on that album is just too good to be ignored imo.

  

Yes, so very much this.

 

To be fair, this album wasn't exactly given much praise upon its release...lots of negative reviews if I remember. It was only years later that it became heralded by rock critics as a bonified classic. A 'slow grower' I guess.

 

What about the once great Lester Bangs, who in this review of Captain Beefheart's The Spotlight Kid/Clear Spot  http://www.rollingstone.com/music/albumreviews/the-spotlight-kid-clear-spot-19720330" rel="nofollow - http://www.rollingstone.com/music/albumreviews/the-spotlight-kid-clear-spot-19720330  "foresees" future promise for the band.  Imagine Beefy making it big! I know folks back then perhaps were more susceptible to prog rock and experimental music, but I can't picture this album being played over the radio. Then again, I'm 31, I have no idea what it was like at the time - apart from what other folks relegate and what I happen to read.

Final Cut is actually my fave PF album...Gilmour has a few great solo's but I'd agree he's treated more like a session musician than a proper writing/contributing member of the band 

Morrison's tone poem "The End" from the debut album seems to get all the attention because it features in the film "Apocalypse Now", but really the first album is just a collection of songs from the band's live performances, without much thought to the way the songs should fit together on the album (other than it should finish with the epic). Still a great album, but not as great as some people make out. Strange Days works so much better as a whole and "When The Music's Over" is a better epic song than "The End". Then Morrison ups the ante and composes his epic masterpiece, "Celebration Of The Lizard". Only problem is that we never get to hear it on the next album. He also writes the best short song he ever wrote, "Universal Soldier" which does appear on Waiting For The Sun so why not the epic? And the actual song "Waiting For The Sun" doesn't appear on this album, but appears on the next one, Morrison Hotel. And the opener for the Waiting For The Sun album is Hello, I Love You, which was a singles hit for The Doors, but it's one of the earliest songs The Doors wrote and a rip off of a Kinks song. Hello, I Love You has no connection with the quality of songs that The Doors were writing at this time, namely "Universal Soldier", Spanish Caravan", "Waiting For The Sun" and Morrison's epic masterpiece, "Celebration Of The Lizard".

great points all round.  Agreed especially about all music guide vs Rolling Stone

The critics seem to think this guy can do no wrong......and he usually gets 4 and 5 stars .

I never connected to what he's saying...and playing.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Springsteen" rel="nofollow - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Springsteen

I used to be a big fan back when I was 10, but I never got around to purchasing anything from him. Didn't stick.

It's probably something only (some) Americans (not me! :-) find appealing. Springsteen, the guy from New Jersey who lived a little too close for comfort to the mean old NY City "jungleland," and wanting to find freedom by jumping into his Chevy, hitting the highway and not stopping till hitting "Nebraska." Probably his music is more a critique than a celebration of this migration out of the cities. Much of America, or at least white America, made the same trek to the suburbs and exurbs to try to escape (blacks) er cities. JP Sartre wrote some essays about his visit to America, and he wrote that Americans really live in their cars, and abandon their homes on the slightest pretext. (His essay on Detroit as a shiny new city birthed overnight and likely to be abandoned at some point seem esp. poignant considering its postapocalyptic decline and bankruptcy. Expect Cheney's Halliburton to come swooping in from their headquarters in Qatar to help oversee its "reconstruction.") Marshall McLuhan wrote, "America's contribution to Architecture is the Highway." I guess Springsteen's music charts this to some extent. The hopes and dreams of his protagonists are victims of these historical and economic processes, but given ideological coatings as "yearning for freedom and the American Dream" bull****... Okay I'll shut up now, haha.

In Denmark we live in trees. That's why we get such good cable.

Same for me.  My wife bought me a biography of him last Christmas and I just started reading it last week.  After a few nights I gave up halfway through because I just couldn't relate to him and what he was all about.  The book was strange, as a teenager they claimed he was a Jeff Beck skill level guitar player then he got his 1st recording contract as a Bob Dylan singer-songwriter unaccompanied acoustic player kind of guy, then he brought his old buddies in and that became the horn based rocking E Street band and he was "The Boss".  That's when I decided I'd rather play I-pad Scrabble than read this silliness 

you shouldn't be that mad about it

also, "because these critics don't know to play on instruments" is not really a valid argument 

It was the mid-1970s for me.  That dumbass with the LA Times who thought Bruce Springsteen was God's gift to music, and that any fictitious named bands (e.g., all prog groups) were to be avoided like the plague, was my reason to never trust a mass-media music reviewer of prog every again...

 

Humorously, after vilifying Neil in their magazine, Rolling Stone later gave both albums 5 stars in their ratings books -- because the rag spends most of its time trying to rewrite rock history, ignoring its own lunacy with a revisionism that equates to publisher Jann Wenner's need to include only bands he approves of in his b*****dized Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Hence, rap bands, the Jacksons, ABBA and other pop performers who were never considered specifically "rock" bands are enshrined, while Yes, King Crimson, Jethro Tull, Deep Purple and The Moody Blues are not. Which is profoundly f***** up.

 

Honestly, compared to what "Animals" was before it became "Animals" two or three years earlier, it deserved the warmed over something or other. But it wasn't that bad, and it should not have been given those words, and the concerts showed that the reviewers were quite wrong!

 

Music journalists are PEOPLE. And the ones at the LA Times, loved to show off their favorites and trash everyone else. They were all experts on The Who and Led Zeppelin and Rolling Stones, but their music tastes after that tended into the area of ... cheap and trash music!

 

A lot of this came to a head when the FM radio coming up, was playing more music than they knew or wanted to discuss, since they had not heard the new stuff enough to know where to go piss and poop. But there were some folks that helped. It's hard to think that Jim Ladd in LA was not major for Pink Floyd, BEFORE the Dark Side.days. But even at that time, Roger already did not care what reviewers said, and later you know how he reacted to things in the "Radio Kaos" thing.

 

The Wall, by the way, also got some bad reviews early, and when the movie came out, all of a sudden, it was great. And then the album hit really big. But it took a couple of months for it to take hold, and in LA, they were playing only two songs (Hey You and Comfortably Numb) until some time later when the other song became a radio hit -- We Don't Need no Education. And from that point on, there were some pundits in LA that thought the whole thing pretentious, but their voice lost its strength given the numbers, the sales and everything else. The 4 shows at the Sports Arena were sold out in like 20 minutes! A totally insane number.

 

So who needs "critics" when they only like crap anyway?

 

It's the same here, really, and you have to put a little salt or sugar on things, and you must remember that it is about YOU, and your listening ability and less about what I or anyone else says.

 

However, you have to know the "inner truth" to know what someone is saying, because not everyone is talking crap! And this is where "fans" get lost in the translation and advertising!

Same here, Doug, screw the critics.

I do like Tormato, but it didn't live up to his claims.

Yep but then Chris Welch just did the fanboy thing by the sounds of it that many of us are guilty of. Nice to have a bit of balance. Welch even turned up at ELP's 25th anniversary convention in 1995 (unlike the band ). Big prog fan Chris.

The early embryonic version of Yes is quite different to the one that emerged in 1972 has to be said. I love the debut and Time and a Word mainly for Tony Kaye's lovely 'crunchy' organ sound. There is a warmth in the music that perhaps was less evident later. Possibly this may be the reason critics turned a bit on them later.

I still have many of his articles and reviews at hand, proof in the cream pudding 

 

I think that Welch was also one of the thrashers on TFTO and Relayer. I would like to see those reviews.

 

Btw, I believe, not sure that I am right or not, but Lester Bangs was the guy that called Tangerine Dream, washing machine music! As I said before, with ears like that who needs his reviews!

the band created the epic Celebration of the Lizard and the only bit of that song that got on the album was Not to Touch the Earth. Celebration... was played live though and it was a live favorite for a while. 

I've read similar things in Downbeat about Herbie Hancocks Mwadishi-albums. Found it. Crossings (they got the title wrong) is just about my favorite album ever. Interesting to read how much of a commercial failure his most creative and interesting period was.

Dogs and Sheep are two of my favorite PF songs. 

There's many more examples. I think all art deserves to be judged for what it has set out to achieve and not be criticized for what it isn't - nor tries to be (rock 'n roll in this context). 

-No matter how negative the review I would most certainly had run to the nearest record shop to get my hands on that Mellotron death of the universe rock-album though.

And there really needs to be prog album titled Flatulent Quasisymphonies...

I was in Ottawa at the time and the FM radio station seemed to like it.  I got all my dorm friends into Renaissance at the time.  I remember it being on the US charts, and at a higher position than what Billboard now claims it reached - perhaps there is revisionist history in the charts when it suits historians.

I thought it was a really good album and a credible move forward for Renaissance.  With proper promotion and a bit of luck it could have launched them into a successful decade.  I would probably never have regarded it as the equal of the mid 70s stuff but I can't begrudge a band hitting paydirt either.

It's a bit ironic that critics savaged it given that they savaged most of Renaissance classic releases for being pretentious and precious, yet when they made a decent stab at straightforward rock, they were criticized for abandoning the style that got them all the bad reviews in the first place.  

Ashes are Burning, the album, got 1 star in the Rolling Stone record guide.  1 star! Absolutely ludicrous.  40 years later it is around 30 on the RS all time greatest prog rock albums.  Vindication perhaps, but maybe some gentler more sympathetic reviews early on could have given the band the recognition they deserved

The Wall's greatness is unmatched, in my mind.  Whenever radio stations used to play the "Top 100" or "Top 1000" classic rock songs or whatever, inevitably they end with Free Bird, or Stairway to Heaven, or maybe Hotel California.  The G.O.A.T. rock album typically ends up being Led Zeppelin's IV or DSoTM or maybe Sgt. Peppers.

In my personal opinion, The Wall is the single greatest rock album of all time, and Another Brick in the Wall Pt. 2 is the greatest single anthem in rock history.   

On the flipside, why exactly is an album like Appetite for Destruction so important?  OK, it's a nice rock album, kicks ass but with the passage of time, it becomes more and more difficult to attach credibility to claims about their originality as they seem very derivative of hard rock in the AC DC/Thin Lizzy mould.  What exactly did they bring to rock that was 'new'? I understand (though don't really agree with) the argument that they signalled a return to roots after the onslaught of slick pop metal but even so, it feels very unsubstantial, very unappetising (ironically) for an album of its repute.  Yeah, sure, Slash played with a lot of flavour but so did Chris Poland and if he could run rings around Dave Mustaine (as confessed by Mustaine himself), pretty sure he would own Slash too.  So more like 'real metal' was too heavy for the brittle bones of aging critics who instead preferred a radio friendly and more boring alternative.

Nothing much to add to the earlier discussion on Wall, lol.  From a  pure prog perspective, I don't know that many albums at all that the critics over-rated badly.  They tended to thrash most of them with qualified praise for a few.  Even the concerts...one stinging review of a Steely Dan show provided the impetus for the band to abandon touring altogether.  If  you listen to the concert, you will understand.  Their only 'mistake' was to play faster than the studio originals and for this they earned the ire of the critic.