Sometimes bad can be so good....

[atomicAdam]

I picked up The Unicorns Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone, a couple months back, and it is such a wonderfully raw and under produced album. The lack of multi million dollar engineering equipment goes unnoticed because in the raw form the flaws all sounds so wonderful together.

It is great to hear just a raw guitar or drum set recorded in a room, some tape fuzz and sometimes musical instruments drowning out the vocals.

Doesn't hurt that I absolutely love the music as well.

But the point being, any of you have any albums you love for the flaws rather than for the mega production?

[Rae]

"I Was Born (A Unicorn)" is a raging jam.

Well, I'm not exactly speaking as an audiophile here-- I tend to think that more records have been ruined by over-production than the reverse-- but I think I see what you're getting at.

One that comes easily to mind is the Mountain Goats' All Hail West Texas. There's a lengthy essay by John Darnielle in the liner notes about how the album is essentially a duet between him and the Panasonic RX-FT500 it was recorded on... sure, sometimes it sounds like he's singing into an answering machine, but I don't know that anything more polished would do his songs justice.

Probably the album that sold me on the idea that lo-fi can be an intentional, beneficial choice was Guided by Voices' Alien Lanes... but it's a theory that's been proven over and over since then.

~Rae