The Guilty Pleasures/So-Bad-They're-Good Albums Thread (retitled)

[privateuniverse]

One album that I absolutely love that people give me a ton of crap for is Shaun Cassidy's Wasp. Released in 1980, it was a complete flop and his final album. Shaun's previous album had also flopped so Todd Rundgren was brought in to help reinvent Shaun as an artist. Rundgren recruited the rest of Utopia to be the band on the album so the album is basically a Utopia LP with a guest singer. Four of the songs are Rundgren originals that Todd himself never recorded. ("Selfless Love" and "Pretending" are classic Todd ballads that I'd love to hear him sing sometime.) The rest of the album is made up of cover tunes. Would you believe that Shaun Cassidy covered David Bowie and The Talking Heads? Yup, it happened. My favorite moment on the LP is a cover of an early, deep Who tune, "So Sad About Us." The song was always pure ear candy. Add Utopia's energy and fantastic harmonies to it and it's a ton of fun.

 

[4-earredwonder]

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Guilty here, too.

How about Secret Garden?

I'm late in responding to Brett's 'guilty pleasure' choices but totally agree, Secret Garden are wonderful, melodic guilty pleasures....in the Windham Hill music genre style.

 

[halbroome]

Tiki music! Yes! Martin Denny and his rivals . . .and others have mentioned Esquivel, who is a fave of mine. Talk about separation: working for a tv station, he used cameras to set up an orchestra in one studio for the left channel, then another A BLOCK DOWN THE STREET for the right channel, and conducted both through cameras! -- afterwards he mixed in sounds swooping from speaker to speaker. Hey, someone try that with quad, ok?

Another fave is on a profile pic of someone on this forum: Leonard Nimoy's MUSIC FROM OUTER SPACE. I digitized my vinyl copy. Come to think of it, that might qualify as lounge music. . . .

Certain movie soundtracks I'm fond of: Bernard Hermann; Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (there's ya Abba, folks!); the classic HAIR, and it's little brother DISINHAIRITED (both on CD, although I had to copy a friend's, as I haven't seen it for sale, although I'm not really looking, lol).

 

[4-earredwonder]

Tiki music! Yes! Martin Denny and his rivals . . .and others have mentioned Esquivel, who is a fave of mine. Talk about separation: working for a tv station, he used cameras to set up an orchestra in one studio for the left channel, then another A BLOCK DOWN THE STREET for the right channel, and conducted both through cameras! -- afterwards he mixed in sounds swooping from speaker to speaker. Hey, someone try that with quad, ok?

Another fave is on a profile pic of someone on this forum: Leonard Nimoy's MUSIC FROM OUTER SPACE. I digitized my vinyl copy. Come to think of it, that might qualify as lounge music. . . .

Certain movie soundtracks I'm fond of: Bernard Hermann; Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (there's ya Abba, folks!); the classic HAIR, and it's little brother DISINHERITED (both on CD, although I had to copy a friend's, as I haven't seen it for sale, although I'm not really looking, lol).

I've always loved Martin Denny's QUIET VILLAGE LP......IMO, the ultimate guilty pleasure:



And wouldn't it be nice if D~V released the original broadway cast of HAIR as a QUAD SACD?

 

[skindzier]

This album obviously isn't universally panned, but this is certainly different than most stuff I listen to & wouldn't come up on too many audiophile lists. Ahh, memories of the teen years...

 

[atrocity]

the classic HAIR, and it's little brother DISINHAIRITED (both on CD, although I had to copy a friend's, as I haven't seen it for sale, although I'm not really looking, lol).

As far as I know, all the CDs of "Disinhairited" are CD-Rs anyway. If you're a fan of those songs, check out the original London cast on ATCO and its companion "Fresh Hair" on Polydor. "Fresh Hair" is sort of the British version of "Disinhairited".

For that matter, there's a CD that combines both of the British recordings but commits the absolute war crime of leaving off "The Flesh Failures" in favor of the far less interesting alternate closing song from "Fresh Hair".