Albums that would have benefited from being less produced
 

In my opinion those are albums with good songwriting but they would have been better with a more stripped-down production:

Tim Buckley - Goodbye & hello
St Vincent - Marry me
Pink Floyd - Dark side of the moon
The Beatles - Let it be
Nick Drake - Bryter later (at least on half the songs, the other half is fine as it is)

Feel free to post your own list :)

There are surely tons of other ones but that's the ones that crossed my mind.

I agree with let it be

I will also say

Experimental Jet Set Trash and No Star

Nevermind, definatly

and parts of Dirty too. Really dont like Butch Vig

REM's Around The Sun was bad

good thread idea

Syd Barrett - Barrett

J Dilla - The Shining

Bob Dylan - Blood On The Tracks

Sonic Youth - Rather Ripped
- Dirty

Common - Like Water For Chocolate

Blonde Redhead - 23

arcade fires neon bible
the cures disintegration

cant think of anything else at this time

I didn't think production was the problem with Rather Ripped.
The Cure's 'Disintegration' I only agree as far as how much more produced the 'pop' songs sound compared to the rest of the album. But then that's always been a problem with them anyway.

Blood on the tracks overproduced ? :confused:

I feel the songwritings very strong, a few exceptions, but generally pretty good. I just feel if they all sounded more like Helen Lundeburg and Eyeliner it would have been far better, and more recognisably Sonic Youth.

"whats your favourite cure album"
"the greatest hits of the cure"

yeah, agreed with you on that point. i dont have a problem with really any of the sy production on albums, maybe with nycg&f but not majorly. even dirty deserves the viggness of the sound, its a big album! rrs problem was the songs if i am brutally honest but its hard to be perfect........

id like to add in the last explosions in the sky album, too much emphasis on production rather than the actual music but i suppose they were trying to recapture the work on the world is not a cold dead place, a near faultless album!

exactly. my favourite tracks of this album are the bonus tracks! thats not a good thing surely.... oh and pink steam.

ummmmm, nirvana's in utero prolly would been cooler if it had been less polished, i still think its great though. pixies trompe le monde too.

Yes sir, you must understand my Dylan collection is mainly the 60s stuff, so it just comes as a bit of a shock to hear how production changed into the 70s. For me Dylan's voice is better suited to the production on, say, Another Side. Blood may not be overproduced, but it's not as underproduced as I like Dylan to be, if y'know what I mean.

I absolutely agree, I'd even go as far as to say Eyeliner and Helen Lundeburg were two of the greatest SY tracks. However, that said I also have a soft spot for Pink Steam, and Or I find very moving indeed.

Ok, from that perspective I get it.

"In Utero" doesn't sound the least bit polished. Did you mean "Nevermind"?
.. Anyway..
Interesting thread.
To be honest, I can hardly think of any albums -- any band that's worth its weight probably doesn't WANT their albums to be overproduced. And in cases of something like production.. I mean, it's always good when things sound good... a lot of bands could benefit from better production...
However, OVERPRODUCTION... 500 layers of guitar on a song that only needs, like, 2... all kinds of ridiculous effects where there doesn't need to be any.. frequencies only your dog could hear.. I can think of a few.. right off hand: A lot of the late-period Wipers albums are way too slickly-produced, almost candy-coated. The songwriting's not that great anymore, but the production is just too... shiney? Also goes for the late-period Husker Du stuff... when you're used to a lo-fi, gritty, trebly sound, putting a bunch of gloss over it can either be used for a very good thing or just totally conceal some of the hard edge from the earlier recordings. I think with those two bands, the latter happened.
Another example I think is the Mars Volta. I don't think they'd be a good band to begin with, but their production is definitely very, very questionable... I've never liked vocal tricks like the same singer saying something in the left speaker and then saying something after that in the right speaker, a kind of ridiculous random call-and-response that usually makes no sense in the context of the song.. Mars Volta does this a lot... they do some other things that are questionable, but that is one thing that annoys the shit out of me...
I'm also going to nominate Jesu, who uses way too many guitar layers and pitch-corrects his voice so much that it seems to make the work too bright and poppy in parts -- usually the songs are good enough that that doesn't matter, but I can think of some specific songs where the production does work against it.
I also agree about Girls Against Boys' "Freak*on*I*ca" and some of the mid-period Fall albums that have too many electronica flourishes...

Honestly, though, good production or bad production doesn't hide a bad song, but it isn't a pleasant listening experience...

Wincing the night away by the Shins is a good album but I dont think the songs quite suit the production apart from one or two cases

If the first Liars album had sounded more polished i think it would be alot better.

One of the reasons i dislike Wowee Zowee by Pavement is its such a scattershot album but the production is clear, it would benefit if it wasnt so polished.

...and finally. Ive always hated the production of Sister. Its crap. I dont like it. Noone agrees with me. Oh well.

Eh? The first Liars album is reeeeeeeally polished.. "mr youreonfiremister" sounds like it was produced to be a dance-punk hit for the ages !

it is polished to a degree yeah but i think it would be better if it was MORE polished, like a proper dance-y album.
Dont get me wrong, its dull as hell and the next two are two of my very favourties, but the production doesnt suit the music in my weighty opinion

Loveless (but then again, that would probably make it impossible to hear the melodies)

Loveless should be LESS produced?!?!?!?!?

It should be more produced, if anything. The drums sound like SHIT.

This is why i cant wait to see MBV in June; The production of Loveless is so shit that it must sound best live.

Suagr's Copper Blue.

i love the first liars ablum. dont think its too or not enough produced, sounds just right. their production is always pretty good in the context of the tunes their making. just their record last year was a major misstep, waaaaaaaaaay over produced. they said they wanted to make an ablum that sounded like nirvana, siouxie and the banshees, the smiths, and guns n roses, and instead they made an ablum that sounded like shit.

So you're saying they were at least partially successful?

BURN.

I'm only familiar with Let It Be and DSOTM, but I'd disagree strongly. Production is what makes those albums great. Contrary to conventional wisdom, what Spector did for Let It Be was indeed an improvment, and DSOTM would be boring and pedestrian without the production/engineering.

Psychocandy by Jesus and Mary Chain.

WAAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYY too much reverb.

I thought Rather Ripped was a pretty bare-bones album :/
Just sounded... really clear.

Basically, I'd say most albums touched by Andy Wallace. With an exception of Faith No More's King For A Day... album, which is one of my all-time favourites.

appetite for destruction is incredible, so no.

the reverb on psychocandy was fucking awesome i think. i love how in some of the songs if you listen with headphones the background screams and reverb sort of mesh together.

dark side is perfect the way it is


hole - celebrity skin
nirvana - nevermind

Megadeth - The System Has Failed. That is a text book example of over production utterly killing anything good on an album.

i'm with you on that, although the songs carry it off. I was thinking the other day it'd be good to hear it re-recorded in their own studio, make it a bit less muddy

And agree with Neon Bible too, and parts of Copper Blue (except The Way We Act which is fucking perfect)

I've been listening to DSOTM probably since I was in kindergarden or so...
I kind of think of it as the ultimate example of a studio album done RIGHT. The album as a work of art itself, not just a collection of the band's songs.

It's something where I'd listen to the CD but probably would never want to hear live, because it would probably never live up to the album.
But, most bands, I just want to hear what they'd play live, but well recorded and all the parts clearly audible. Sometimes, crazy production works, but a lot of times it just sounds like they're trying to needlessly fancy up something that doesn't need fancying, thus making it sound dumb. The production tricks of the day sometimes also just date the bands more than a raw sound would.

most nick cave albums.
and the latest frog eyes album. there is just way too much going on.

I think it has just enough reverb and white noise.
Anyway, The Cure - Faith
None of the songs (except for a one or two) stand out, they just sound too similar. Maybe I don't really like it because it was released in between Seventeen Seconds and Pornography, and I had high expectations for it.

The Cure - Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me
Primal Scream - Screamadelica

The long and winding road on Anthology 3 proves my point (the version on Let it be is sugary and cheesy, the version on Anthology 3 is magnificent).

Regarding Dark side of the moon some of the effects are over the top, when you just hear Gilmour playing the songs like on the Live at Pompei or the Classic albums documentary it's much better.