Acclaimed albums where only two songs are worth saving

Acclaimed albums where you only like one or two tracks

How many masterpieces can you sit through in full? The question runs through a 200-comment discussion that starts with five untouchable names and ends up as a reckoning with the canon. The starting point is a list of full listens and scores: Ziggy Stardust lands at 7/10 with only three keepable tracks, Loveless by My Bloody Valentine boils down to "When You Sleep", and from Remain In Light by Talking Heads only "Once In A Lifetime" survives. From Björk's Vespertine and Mingus's The Black Saint And The Sinner Lady, not a single track is remembered. The author sums it up without anesthesia: he doesn't like jazz.

The pattern repeats ad nauseam. A critically revered album, a full listen, a handful of songs that justify the effort, and a verdict ranging from "meh" to a fail. What's striking isn't the disdain but the discipline: the person who fires the opening shot claims to have listened to more than 1,300 complete albums, start to finish, several times over. This is not a singles listener. This is someone who forces himself to finish what he starts and then settles the score.

From "meh" to 10: grading the canon

The exercise is organized with scores. Genesis's Selling England by the Pound gets a 10; King Crimson's Red, a 9; Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here and Animals, a 9 and an 8.5; Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells, an 8. At the other end, Lou Reed's Berlin drops to 4/10, and Supertramp's Crime of the Century and Bowie's Low are dismissed with a "meh" that in this register amounts to acquittal for lack of evidence.

Some argue the problem is methodological: the album as a format is overrated and most are "collections of lesser songs tied to one or two hits." The response comes as an emphatic defense of the complete work, without a second of filler. Two ways of understanding music that will never meet.

The Pet Sounds case: is one song enough to justify an album?

The most cited example is the Beach Boys. From Pet Sounds only "God Only Knows" and "Wouldn't It Be Nice" survive, and even so it's conceded that the former is "mind-blowing" and that on its own the album deserves to exist. The rest, the argument goes, doesn't stand out after four or five consecutive listens. The anecdote writes itself: someone places "Good Vibrations" on the album and gets corrected. It's not on it. It's a single from the same era, recorded separately.

The pattern repeats with Neil Young: from Harvest only "A Man Needs A Maid" holds up; from After The Gold Rush, nothing. With Nick Drake, "River Man" and "Way To Blue" from a Five Leaves Left that later fades out on Pink Moon. With The Cure, Prono is reduced to "One Hundred Years" and the single "Charlotte Sometimes", recorded in the same sessions but left off the album. And with Björk, Homogenic comes down to "Jóga" and little else, while from Vespertine "Pagan Poetry", "Hidden Place" and the closing "Unison" are championed as an absolute gem.

Jazz and pogre rock as a battleground

The rejection of jazz is declared without detours: it's boring. The diagnosis is technical. It's "constant chord or key changes for the musicians' enjoyment, not the listener's," endless detours that never reach a concrete point. The opposing defense doesn't deny it: it's directionless music, a divertissement where the idea matters more than virtuosity. Two descriptions of the same phenomenon and no way to reconcile them.

Pogre rock fares better. After Crying, a Hungarian band, sneaks into the conversation as an insistent recommendation, with the caveat that their pianist and composer, Csaba Vedres, left the band with the third album nearly finished. The group dissolved in 2021 and its founding cellist, Péter Pejtsik, was left in charge of a project that generates more friction than music. The anecdote of the album announced for a year, composed solo and presented as if it were the band's, explains better than any review why the complete work isn't always what it promises.

The proposal that flips the problem

Amid the inventory of disappointments, the most useful idea appears: do it the other way around. Instead of looking for acclaimed albums where you only save two tracks, list the ones you like almost in full. The proposed example is Fleetwood Mac's Rumours, of which at most half the songs survive. The question stops being what's wrong with the album and becomes what's wrong with the masterpiece label.

Because the canon isn't a closed list. Loveless, for instance, is debated as to whether it's universally acclaimed: some have never seen it on any list of the best albums of all time. And yet, whoever heard it when it came out remembers the impact of "Only Shallow" melting people live. Two simultaneous truths: the album that doesn't appear on the lists and the one that changed a room.

The conclusion, if there is one, is uncomfortable. The perfect album doesn't exist; the album you can sit through in full does. And almost nobody sits through in full the one they claim to admire.