Kid A is a damn good album, it’s just in a whole different genre.
Even if you think OK Computer was better - certainly a defensible argument - in no sense is that were Radiohead “fell off.” Amnesiac and Hail To The Thief were exactly what people wanted after Kid A. (Whatever they wanted right after OK Computer, tough shit, that band died on tour.)
In Rainbows was definitely a little off. There’s a lot going right. It’s all very tonally consistent, even compared to Thief. But there’s the plain seeds of whatever the fuck went wrong for King Of Limbs. Thom. How’d you fuck up “Morning, Mister Magpie?” It was beautiful on the MGLMOAT sessions.
As massive R.E.M. fan, this made me conflicted! Automatic for the People is beautiful, and most days my favourite, but I wouldn’t want to miss where the band went after.
Their last album was brilliant, Accelerate was fun… I know AftP was a hell of a peak, but I can’t find it in me to write off anything except a chunk of Around the Sun…
Thank you for allowing me to talk about my favourite band. :)
Accelerate was a lot of fun, but for me the last album that was stellar front to back was Life’s Rich Pageant. It was joyous, raucous, and they hit their signature sound head on. Every track sparkled (even the Superman cover that Michael hated).
That’s a very fair opinion too! I feel they changed about 4 times as a band (understandably I guess as they were about for 3 decades), and damn Life’s Rich Pageant was special - it’s one I play very often, and it is stacked! :)
It’s the best they sounded as a pure rock band, even though I have such a soft spot for Murmur. New Adventures touched on that feeling again, but it wasn’t front to back perfect in the same way (partly because of its length!)
The trouble I have is I couldn’t imagine life without what came after Life’s Rich Pageant, for instance Automatic meant a great deal to me, as it was the first album I remember hearing and loving growing up. :)
For sure! One of the reasons they’re such an amazing band is that they were able to innovate and adapt over a long career without losing their core style. They grew with their audience instead of apart from it.
My opinion is based on my own music preference (I’m a sucker for power pop) but there’s no denying R.E.M. stayed at the top of their game far longer than most bands even stay together.
Idk if I would say they “fell off” but Demon Days was fucking AMAZING and Plastic Beach was really good. Plus all their stuff from before that ranged from good to great too. Everything that came after Plastic Beach was…. Mediocre at best and this is just my own subjective opinion obviously as is anyone’s opinion on music but like I grew up listening to all sorts of electronic music and I just don’t like any of their newer stuff it’s experimental though which aligns with their style I’ll give them that
Not their last album before Roger Waters left the band (that was The Final Cut, the album which followed), but it was far superior, and arguably their best album-- and inarguably their magnum opus.
The David Gilmour-led era of Pink Floyd was ok, but it would never reach the fevered heights and sick intensity of the Roger Waters days.
Some of the tracks are based on his childhood, and seeing how many The Wall tours he did. In 2016 he turned it into an opera. So the album is very personal to him.
A lot of the tracks have to do with what both Waters and Gilmour went through as children, as they both lost their fathers to World War II. David Gilmour got writing credit on a bunch of the tracks as well. And given the amount of work that both Waters and Gilmore put into the album, it’s not really right to say that it was a solo project. Not even to mention what Nick Mason put into it. If you wanna cut out Richard Wright’s contributions, considering that he got fired during this album’s production, that would be fair. 
The Wall is absolutely Rogers album. The concept and the songs are all his. Gilmour only received credits on three of the songs.
You can’t point to a few guitar solos and then give Gilmour half the credit, it was a great contribution, but even Gilmour would admit that Roger wrote the wall.
More popular, more commercially successful, and more accessible to casual fans. Agreed.
But for magnum opus, I gotta agree with the wall for a few reasons
They made a movie out of it
The ode to the intense para social relationships that revolve around stardom and how a truly crazy creative can take advantage of it in scary ways was not only true back then, but predictive of how much worse it would get in current time.
DSotM always seemed like a lot of good ideas in an unordered list. I felt like they could be scrambled and the album would be similar, except for the first and last songs… Meanwhile the wall tells a story of pain, alienation, search for meaning, lashing out, and then a quest for self-forgiveness.
Is this a joke? This is where they’re newfound mediocrity was cemented. They peaked at Ride the Lightning, everything after that was more and more watered down garbage.
Nothing any of them have done since has matched the quality of creativity that they did on aod.
I’m not saying I didn’t like the use your illusion pair, and Slash has done some damn good work on specific songs in his various projects. But the band as a whole fell off hard after their very first. Axl in particular kinda lost his songwriting during use your illusion, which had some great songs, but it wasn’t consistently great as albums
This is really the only band I have that hipster thought that they were better before they got big. This was the last album they made that I love every song on. Then they dropped Good News for People Who Like Bad News and their style was almost completely different, but also got many more people listening to the band.
Similarly I liked Kings of Leon before they changed the original vocalist. They had a rather unique sound when I discovered Aha Shake Heartbreak, but by Only By The Night, they had completely lost everything about their sound that I liked.
I’m in agreement that The Moon and Antarctica is the peak album, but I feel Good News is a great representation of the band transcending into something brand new rather than just fizzling. It’s Iike going out with a bang. Then after that it feels like fizzle haha.
I would probably have hated Good News if I had followed them before it came out, but it has a great representation of rebirth and becoming an unapologetically new person. I return to it usually when I go through loss.
It’s bizarre to hear anyone mention anything other than Master of Puppets. As an old school death metal guitar player turned jazz geezer, Master of Puppets is, by a wide margin, unanimously considered the best metal album of all time by most metal musicians who know their shit.
Yeah. But I’m just naming ones I can think of where the album was never eclipsed. It just so happens that that is the case for those guitar players…and it’s not like we’re going to hear Yngwie or Johnson somehow suddenly reinvent themselves this late in their careers.
For example, I’m a HUGE fan of Khruangbin and Julian Lage but….what will Julian Lage or Khruangbin give us in the future? We may never know if they have peaked until that time has passed.
Hard disagree on Rush’s 2112 being peek, if anything that album was the start of one of the greatest streaks in music history. They did like 4-5 excellent albums after that. Personally if I were to rank Rush albums, I’d put Farewell to Kings above 2112, maybe hemispheres too if only for La Villa Strangiatto. Not that I don’t love 2112, but relative to the other albums in that streak I think it’s a little tiny bit overrated
Agreed. Peak Rush is Hemispheres (Circumstances is possibly the best rock song ever written) for me, but really I love almost everything from Fly by Night to Grace Under Pressure. That’s 8 albums I can easily listen to front-to-back.
Whelp. As I typed I realized I forgot about Caress of Steel. I suppose that says something…
White Album? Abbey Road? I mean, even if you aren’t a big fan of Yellow Submarine or Magical Mystery Tour, how can you say freaking Abbey Road is a comedown from Sgt Pepper’s?
Man, if you liked deloused I get why you’d be disappointed by what comes after, but Francis the Mute is something else. It’s structured way different, it’s a damn opera, but 20 years on that is my all time favorite album.
That’s arguable, and even then it could only ever be considered marginally better than Plastic Beach. Even if you don’t like the new stuff, PB is fire.
Also a great album, I just feel the other two were their peak and contrary to Green Day (that I also mentioned), I’ve continued listening to Radiohead, including their new albums and they’re all great!
Fair enough ‘Steal This Album’ has a few flat tracks but there are so many great songs. Also, every song on Mezmerize is wicked. Granted, not in the same mood as Toxicity but far out… So so good.
I agree that Songs for the deaf is QOTSA’s magnum opus, but majority of their other albums are bangers too and it feels unfair to say they fell off after it
As for Green Day, I feel like American idiot is the album where we could see they were really letting go of their punk roots and wanted to make stuff that would sell… But Dookie was my first cassette ever so I’m biased.
Yeah that’s fair, and dookie is a really good album, though I do like american idiot more. Jesus of Suburbia, Homecoming, Holiday, Boulevard and American Idiot are just such bangers and the concept of the album is just really cool.
The thing that impresses me so much about Green Day is that they peaked, had the usual big falloff in quality a few albums later, then they peaked again about a decade after Dookie. I can’t think of any other band that managed to do this off the top of my head.
Songs for the Deaf is incredible, but how could you say they fell off when Like Clockwork Era Vulgaris exists and is clearly their best album all the way through?
I’d have to disagree with QotSA, but I can definitely see why. I’m a huuuge fan of theirs, but for some reason every new QotSA album seems to take years for me to fully appreciate. I absolutely hated Era Vulgaris when it first came out. It’s by far my favorite album of theirs now. Even …like clockwork is barely starting to really grow on me, but I’m definitely coming around. I haven’t even bothered to listen to their newest one yet.
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