Musical artists' "Dead Zones"

[Dr. Strange]

This article makes a good case for not overlooking an artist's dead zone:

Dead zones: Why we shouldn’t overlook recording artists’ worst work

Like many devoted music listeners, professional or otherwise, I like hearing others’ opinions about music. I like agreeing. I like disagreeing. I like how differing views make me think about what I’m hearing—and what I’m not. Starting in my teens, I pored through music magazines of all shapes, sizes, and origins. I spoke with my friends and family and my family’s friends and even those supposedly rude clerks at the indie record store, absorbing every morsel of musical opinion I could.

Those opinions served a vital purpose: They helped me form a bedrock of conventional wisdom. That bedrock helped me keep firm footing as I began wandering through the overwhelming preponderance of recorded music in existence. It helped me focus my attention on the few, oh, hundred thousand albums that might actually be worth exploring.

There’s a problem with that, though: Sometimes conventional wisdom is a big, fat liar.

more at http://www.avclub.com/articles/dead-zones-why-we-shouldnt-overlook-recording-arti,83121/

The author mentions Hold Your Fire as Rush's "dead zone" but I've always thought Grace Under Pressure was their dz. And yet, it's an awesome (if not totally un-Rush sounding) album.

Anyway, come share what you consider to be some musician's dead zone.

P.S. MrCoffee, please refrain from posting about Hall & Oates, as their entire career is a dead zone.

[OriginalGeek]

1. It's funny that Rush was the first thing I thought of

before even reading past your first sentence. Having been a HUGE Rush fan before GUP and HYF I admit I was disappointed in them when they came out and even stopped paying attention to Rush for a long while. Then I met a guy in the early 90s who was a few years younger than I and he was a HUGE fan of Rush because of GUP and HYF and Roll The Bones - he had heard all those albums first and learned of earlier Rush through them and his unbridled exuberance for the mid-career Rush albums made me take another look at them and now they have grown on me. Some of my favorite songs come from that period.


So far the only mainstream act I don't acknowledge a dead zone for is Led Zeppelin. I love every single thing they ever did and most everything the individual members have done since.


Black Sabbath had a few dead zones - I know a lot of people hate on Never Say Die and Technical Ecstasy but I like a few songs from those records. Other people hate on the Ronnie James Dio era but I love both those albums. I liked Born Again with Ian Gillan but then into the 80s and 90s Tony picked some pretty lame front-men and I haven't paid any attention to them. Maybe I'll go look at those albums again and see if any of them can rise from the dead zone for me.

[Tom Ripley]

2. Lou Reed's "Sally Can't Dance"

The rockandroll scribbling class (critics, journalists, whatever) falls in line and dismisses that album because Lester Bangs thought it was terrible.
He was wrong, and they are wrong.
It contains some of Reed's sharpest lyrics and most gorgeous melodies.

[LynneSin]

3. I don't care what anyone says - I love 'Tormato' by Yes

Probably because it was the first YES album I ever bought but probably because it was for $0.99 in the discount record bin. I mean I figured it was YES and I love 'The Yes Album'. Rolling Stone Magazine gave it a very unfavorable review.