Artists with a PERFECT discography? - Music

CharlieBarley

Gender: Male
Age: 48
Location: Mount Olympus

Pink Floyd

flamingyesdept
Ben Lester

Gender: Male
Age: 26
Location: London

I would say Steely Dan, though their last album isn't great. Still, 9 out of 10 (if you count the Nightfly) if pretty bloody good. Big Star had a perfect run of three masterpiece albums then ruined it with the sub-par In Space comeback album 30 years later. I reckon every XTC album is worth listening to, even if some are better than others.
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RoundTheBend
I miss the comfort in being sad

Location: Ground Control

I can't name a single band with a PERFECT discography. They all have black sheep.

Actually - perhaps Nirvana. I don't like the live muddy banks album, but all of their studio albums - not a bad step on it.

And then Jeff Buckley.

Makes it easy when you only have like 4 albums... or one.

Honorable mentions though:

Beatles: Revolver on wards is perfect in my opinion. Not a bad step.
U2: Boy until Pop in my opinion doesn't have a bad step.
R.E.M.: A couple 80s albums and then Reveal - other than that perfect.
Muse technically is perfect - but also perfectly boring... it's just the same thing over and over again, as brilliant as that formula is, it gets boring.
Beck is a contender
Smashing Pumpkins until 2000
Coldplay until Death and all his friends
Arcade Fire minus their EP
Red Hot Chili Peppers: Mothers Milk until Stadium Arcadium
Jimi Hendrix - kinda
Rolling Stones: Beggars Banquet through Exile - then a couple after. The rest is shite.

Anyway I'm getting lost here... blah blah - some people have some really good strings, but really they all have crap albums.

Daydreamer

Well if you're including those runs, absolutely nothing beats Pink Floyd from 1973-1979, and since I really like The Final Cut I could expand it to 1973-1983. And of course as I said Radiohead after PH.
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SleepDealer

Location: Isca Dumnoniorum

My picks would be:

Broadcast
Do Make Say Think
Joanna Newsom

Narrowly missing out (consistent discographies, I'm just not as crazy about them):

The Books
The Shins
Vampire Weekend

In the 'Radiohead' category:

Cocteau Twins - all great apart from their debut Garlands.
Flying Lotus - ditto 1983
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craola
crayon master

Location: pdx

SleepDealer wrote:

My picks would be:

Broadcast
Do Make Say Think
Joanna Newsom

Narrowly missing out (consistent discographies, I'm just not as crazy about them):

The Books
The Shins
Vampire Weekend

In the 'Radiohead' category:

Cocteau Twins - all great apart from their debut Garlands.
Flying Lotus - ditto 1983

agreed on all points.
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AfterHours

Gender: Male
Location: originally from scaruffi.com ;-)

I know Classical music isn't the intent of this thread, and looking at it from the perspective of "discographies" sort of disqualifies many Classical artists (as their compositions tend to be recorded by several different recording artists and not usually by themselves in linear fashion) ... but it's worth mentioning that Johannes Brahms is perhaps the ultimate answer to such a query (if looked at from "compositions/music works" instead of only "discographies"). He may be the most consistently high quality musician/composer in music history. I am not aware of a single bad apple in his entire career, not to mention that he wrote several all time masterpieces and near masterpieces.

I could say a similar thing about J.S. Bach, perhaps even more extraordinary considering the sheer number of works he produced (over 1000).

Mozart has some early works that were pretty trivial (but still quite impressive for an "amateur"), but if we look at his career once he started reaching maturity, his consistency is incredible as well.

Beethoven probably reached greater, sustained heights than any of them, but wasn't quite as consistent.

But Brahms and Bach are probably the most consistently HQ music artists ever, without many (or perhaps any) works that were less than "good-to-excellent" (or better) in their entire oeuvre.

(Come to think of it, Mahler, though much less prolific than many of the great composers, is probably a very good answer to the question too)
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RoundTheBend
I miss the comfort in being sad

Location: Ground Control

AfterHours wrote:

I know Classical music isn't the intent of this thread, and looking at it from the perspective of "discographies" sort of disqualifies many Classical artists (as their compositions tend to be recorded by several different recording artists and not usually by themselves in linear fashion) ... but it's worth mentioning that Johannes Brahms is perhaps the ultimate answer to such a query (if looked at from "compositions/music works" instead of only "discographies"). He may be the most consistently high quality musician/composer in music history. I am not aware of a single bad apple in his entire career, not to mention that he wrote several all time masterpieces and near masterpieces.

I could say a similar thing about J.S. Bach, perhaps even more extraordinary considering the sheer number of works he produced (over 1000).

Mozart has some early works that were pretty trivial (but still quite impressive for an "amateur"), but if we look at his career once he started reaching maturity, his consistency is incredible as well.

Beethoven probably reached greater, sustained heights than any of them, but wasn't quite as consistent.

But Brahms and Bach are probably the most consistently HQ music artists ever, without many (or perhaps any) works that were less than "good-to-excellent" (or better) in their entire oeuvre.

(Come to think of it, Mahler, though much less prolific than many of the great composers, is probably a very good answer to the question too)

Bach I agree with. Although I haven't heard all his pieces obviously, but there's nothing really boring of his. Even the St. Mathäus Passion is exquisite.

Brahms on the other hand somehow always bores me. I just don't get the emotional vigor and mental stimulation from his works like I do other composers.

Agree with your assessments of Mahler, Beethoven, and Mozart though.

Also to be fair, we are discussing discography, not music career or cultural/artistic impact. Technically none of these artists produced a discography in the modern sense. I suppose you could call the Leonard Bernstein or Herbert von Karajan recordings a discography.

I suppose there's cataloged music by these musicians, and perhaps that can be translated into discography as it is a similar idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%B6chel_catalogue

Splitting hairs I know, but wanted to make that distinction.

AfterHours

Gender: Male
Location: originally from scaruffi.com ;-)

sethmadsen wrote:

AfterHours wrote:

I know Classical music isn't the intent of this thread, and looking at it from the perspective of "discographies" sort of disqualifies many Classical artists (as their compositions tend to be recorded by several different recording artists and not usually by themselves in linear fashion) ... but it's worth mentioning that Johannes Brahms is perhaps the ultimate answer to such a query (if looked at from "compositions/music works" instead of only "discographies"). He may be the most consistently high quality musician/composer in music history. I am not aware of a single bad apple in his entire career, not to mention that he wrote several all time masterpieces and near masterpieces.

I could say a similar thing about J.S. Bach, perhaps even more extraordinary considering the sheer number of works he produced (over 1000).

Mozart has some early works that were pretty trivial (but still quite impressive for an "amateur"), but if we look at his career once he started reaching maturity, his consistency is incredible as well.

Beethoven probably reached greater, sustained heights than any of them, but wasn't quite as consistent.

But Brahms and Bach are probably the most consistently HQ music artists ever, without many (or perhaps any) works that were less than "good-to-excellent" (or better) in their entire oeuvre.

(Come to think of it, Mahler, though much less prolific than many of the great composers, is probably a very good answer to the question too)

Bach I agree with. Although I haven't heard all his pieces obviously, but there's nothing really boring of his. Even the St. Mathäus Passion is exquisite.

Brahms on the other hand somehow always bores me. I just don't get the emotional vigor and mental stimulation from his works like I do other composers.

Agree with your assessments of Mahler, Beethoven, and Mozart though.

Also to be fair, we are discussing discography, not music career or cultural/artistic impact. Technically none of these artists produced a discography in the modern sense. I suppose you could call the Leonard Bernstein or Herbert von Karajan recordings a discography.

I suppose there's cataloged music by these musicians, and perhaps that can be translated into discography as it is a similar idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%B6chel_catalogue

Splitting hairs I know, but wanted to make that distinction.

Re: we are discussing discographies... ... See my first paragraph again. You may have read it before I revised it.

Re: Brahms ... If you are intent on revisiting him, his 3rd and 4th Symphonies are probably the best starting point to appreciating his mastery and supreme genius. Along with being endlessly compelling examples of emotional ambiguity, they are astonishing masterpieces of "cyclic form" and the expansion of an idea into accumulating compositional architecture and melodic/thematic/motivic depths of musical "reverberation" (echoes/premonitions/mergings unto itself throughout every aspect of the work) on the order of Beethoven's 5th and any of his ensuing symphonies or works, save for perhaps his 14th SQ and 9th Symphony.
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Last edited by AfterHours on 06/29/2017 01:15; edited 1 time in total

Tha1ChiefRocka
Yeah, well hey, I'm really sorry.

Location: Kansas

Quote:

Re: Brahms ... If you are intent on revisiting him, his 3rd and 4th Symphonies are probably the best starting point to appreciating his mastery and supreme genius. Along with being endlessly compelling examples of emotional ambiguity, they are astonishing masterpieces of "cyclic theme" and the expansion of an idea into accumulating compositional architecture and melodic/thematic/motivic depths of musical "reverberation" (echoes/premonitions/mergings unto itself throughout every aspect of the work) on the order of Beethoven's 5th and any of his ensuing symphonies or works, save for perhaps his 14th SQ and 9th Symphony.

Not to mention even his non-symphonic work (the Hungarian Dances) are some of the liveliest music you'll ever hear.