The 10 most overproduced rock albums ever made
There’s never a set formula for how to produce the perfect rock album. For every record that rockets into iconic status by sounding absolutely pristine, there are just as many that get their power by sounding like they were recorded from inside of a dirty trash compactor. It all depends on what kind of artist you’re working with, but when approaching a few of their respectful projects, artists like Pink Floyd may have overcommitted to their ideas just a little bit.
Whether by the label’s insistence or by design, many of these albums ended up sounding just a little too cleaned up when they finally hit store shelves. While some of them happen to reeks of corporate meddling, not every record that’s considered “overproduced” has to mean “sell-out”, either.
A lot of times, bands just want to go in a new direction and happen to put every single detail into the mix to make everything sound perfect. So that means instead of getting a song that would benefit from a sparse arrangement, most of us are stuck with the kind of symphonic piece that may as well be the artist trying their best to imitate Mozart with a Sallieri-level of skillset.
At least those kinds of albums are trying, but there are a handful that did go too far the other way and sounded like they were manufactured in a lab rather than sculpted from the minds of true artists. There are always different solutions to any problem in the studio, but by taking the easy route, this wasn’t just an overproduction. This was enough to leave fans shaking their heads, wondering where the classic version of their favourite act went.
10 most overproduced rock albums
10. Hold Your Fire – Rush
Any good progressive rock act usually has different periods of their sound. Pink Floyd had a period of grand visions like Dark Side of the Moon and Animals, and how could anybody forget the episodic sounds of Yes’s epic era that peaked with records like Close to the Edge and Relayer? When you start off at the top like Rush did, though, there was only one place to go once the 1980s kicked off. Hello, synthesizers!
The Canadian icons did take a long time to embrace their synth-heavy tendencies, but once they got to the mid-1980s, they started to look a lot more like Flock of Seagulls than the dudes wearing kimonos on the back of 2112. Of all those records, Hold Your Fire is by far one of the most dated in that respect, complete with keyboard lines that feel like they should be on a B-tier MTV starlet’s record, only this time, the hooks are coming out of Geddy Lee’s voice as he desperately tries to play the keyboards, bass, and sing at the same time.
Despite everything in the mix being filtered through what sounds like some digital effect, the fact that they could still turn it into a solid-gold hit with ‘Time Stand Still’ is quite honestly a miracle. A band that sounded like this didn’t have any right to survive past 1987, but for someone like Rush, it’s just a gloriously cheesy stopgap in between the classics.
9. Make Believe – Weezer
Rivers Cuomo has always had a complicated relationship with his fans. As much as he may count his lucky stars to be playing music for a living, the massive sting that was left over from Weezer’s work on Pinkerton has made him constantly question whether or not his fans like his music for the same reasons he liked it. If you don’t know which audience to please, though, trying to please both of them at the exact same time was bound to get clunky once Make Believe began production.
Sculpted as the perfect bridge between their emotional side and carefree spirit, this feels like the most hodgepodge album in the group’s career. While there are by far worse records like Raditude in their discography, the album spends most of its time not sure what it wants to be, either making arena-rock style anthems like ‘Perfect Situation’ and then trying to get introspective about Cuomo’s real-life struggles on tracks like ‘Pardon Me’.
That might also have to do with the fact that Cuomo ended up completely changing his emotional state halfway through production, which leads to songs that are genuinely tortured put right next to tunes that could go toe-to-toe with ‘Island in the Sun’ for the sunniest California rock tracks ever made. Make Believe deserved a much better fate than it ultimately got, but its heights are never going to be able to reach the heights that their original one-two punch saw.
8. Time – Fleetwood Mac
No band is better at thriving under pressure than Fleetwood Mac. They had been pronounced dead in the water numerous times along the way, and yet whenever they seemed to be counted out completely, something like Rumours or even Tango in the Night would come out and knock everyone on their ass. But that’s only if the right people are accounted for, and it seems like only Mick Fleetwood and Christine McVie bothered to join the party on Time.
Then again, that’s being a little bit mean to Rick Vito and Bekka Bramlett. Neither of them is terrible by any means, but after coming off of a guitar god like Lindsey Buckingham and the power behind Stevie Nicks’s prose, most of this record feels like a country-rock act that should have stayed within the confines of the Troubadour back in the 1976 and gone their separate ways.
That’s before you realise that half of the album didn’t want to make this record, with McVie not getting along with members of the group anymore and recording most of her songs in completely different studios. Fleetwood Mac completists might find a place in their hearts for this album, but it’s hard to emotionally connect with a record that sounds like it was pasted together from parts of other albums.
7. A Momentary Lapse of Reason – Pink Floyd
If Pink Floyd had decided to bow out following The Wall, it would have been one of the single best endings to a career anyone had ever seen. While there was still great music to be made after that, hearing them close the final chapter of their discography with someone finding peace as a rockstar would have been one of the more poetic finales anyone had ever done. But even though Roger Waters insisted on making a glorified solo album with The Final Cut, David Gilmour proved he could do it just as well after getting rid of Waters in the 1980s.
From the minute that A Momentary Lapse of Reason begins, this is the sound of Gilmour cutting loose with a backing band that happens to resemble Pink Floyd. Because outside of programming on a few songs, Richard Wright and Nick Mason are barely on the main album, which makes the lush orchestrations feel a little bit hollow when tearing through tunes like ‘Learning to Fly’.
But the reason why this is on here and not The Final Cut is really due to the quality of the tracks. Waters’s album was already a tough sell for anyone who hadn’t liked The Wall, but there are a lot of great tracks on here like ‘On the Turning Away’ that could be great but are buried underneath a mountain of production issues. If anything, playing some of these cuts on the live album Delicate Sound of Thunder felt like a subtle way to rescue them from studio purgatory.
6. Flowers in the Dirt – Paul McCartney
The biggest challenge of any artist is trying to be one step ahead of the zeitgeist. No one truly knows what’s coming next, but if you’re able to roll with the punches and still write great tunes in the process, the mainstream is more than willing to keep you around for as long as they see fit. But even though Paul McCartney earned his card as an immortal of classic rock, Flowers in the Dirt was the first time he started to sound desperate to move with the times.
Press to Play had signalled that bad times might be on the horizon, but looking at the production pedigrees on here, Macca was clearly looking to grab some of that Tears for Fears money as well. Despite the duets with Elvis Costello going off without a hitch, something like ‘Distractions’ feels supremely undercooked, almost like McCartney didn’t know how to finish the tune, so he smothered a bunch of keyboards on top.
And while some items stick out as genuine, like ‘Put It There’ and ‘This One’, a tune like ‘Motor of Love’ feels way too lethargic to be done by a Beatle, especially when the chorus comes and sounds like the theme song to a daytime soap opera. McCartney was always great at infusing his personality into his songs, but this is the closest he ever teetered to sounding like a full-blown dad rocker.
5. The Long Run – Eagles
It’s about time we discussed the common disease known as Follow-Up Syndrome. Despite many artists succumbing to the horrible condition, having to make a new album after releasing a classic has also been a tremendous motivator for any artist trying to outdo whatever else they had been working on. But if someone like the Eagles had already captured the harsh reality of living the California dream, would it have come as any surprise that they didn’t know where to go from there afterwards?
After coming to the studio with no songs completed, Don Henley and Glenn Frey turned The Long Run into ‘The Album That Would Not End’. While the final product is clear and concise, every one of their songs sounds like it was laboured over to fill a quota, especially with their attempts at college rock on ‘The Greeks Don’t Want No Freaks’ or trying their best to be a knock-off blues outfit on ‘Those Shoes.’
Even though the magic does return on tracks like ‘The Sad Cafe’, it’s far too little, far too late. And considering the lyrics of that song have to deal with a golden era coming and going, who knows if Henley didn’t see a breakup in the making and was trying to document those good times on one last tune?
4. Be Here Now – Oasis
For Noel Gallagher, everything that made Oasis legends was going to hinge on their third album. It’s one thing to sidestep the sophomore slump, but if they were able to take their next outing after What’s the Story Morning Glory one step further, they were bound to become the next iconic band alongside The Beatles and Led Zeppelin. Be Here Now sure as hell sounded like that brand of record; you only had to work past the white noise to actually hear it.
Because when looking at every song, everything reeks of too much time in the studio. The Gallaghers no doubt knew that they needed to come through with something big, but the idea of putting an album together where every song is being pushed as far as it can go in the mix goes from sounding like the next Abbey Road to the kind of album that gives people ear fatigue the moment they start listening.
Even though Be Here Now is perfect in its own weird way for being so extravagant, it’s a shame that a handful of songs ended up getting buried underneath guitar overdubs and mountains upon mountains of cocaine. The seeds were all there to make a classic, but in trying to reach for the stars, Noel may have accidentally created a monster that would devour the rest of the Britpop movement.
3. Chinese Democracy – Guns N’ Roses
The worst thing that any artist can be given is total control. If they are given parameters to work in, they will always find ways to work around them, and that will usually lead to taking more risks than they would normally do on classic projects. Once there was no one else to touch Guns N’ Roses, though, Axl Rose tucked himself away inside his recording studio and didn’t come out for another 15 years for Chinese Democracy.
If Rose had his way, though, the record wouldn’t have sounded like this at all. This was destined to be the kind of album that would be the mathematical lovechild between Bowie, Elton John, The Beatles and Aerosmith all at the same time, but by bringing in every special guest he had the phone number of, tracks like ‘Better’ and ‘If The World’ end up showcasing a glorified supergroup playing what they think a Guns N’ Roses anthem is supposed to sound like.
That’s before even getting to the behind-the-scenes drama, which included new guitarist Buckethead having a chicken coup installed in the studio and the ending price tag being over $13 million. Having the most expensive rock album title to your name is no small feat, but if it’s all attached to a bunch of lukewarm ideas, was it really worth it?
2. Never Let Me Down – David Bowie
As David Bowie once talked about in the song of the same name, ‘Fame’ can be a double-edged sword. No one would be complaining if they had millions of people chanting their name every time they got up onstage, but those screaming fans also mean having a lot more responsibilities when it comes to making any new record. And while Bowie was the last person that someone should put into a box, his time as a pop star hit the ceiling hard when Never Let Me Down.
Bowie had already dismissed this era of his career as his “Phil Collins years,” but even by the Genesis frontman’s standards, a good chunk of this record is artery-cloggingly cheesy. Outside of having Mickey Rourke showing up for one of the wildest cameos ever made on a hit song, putting that signature reverb on the snare drum is annoying from the moment it starts, almost like Bowie wanted to try on his Right Said Fred impression years before they even hit the scene.
Despite the efforts to clean up the mixes for various anniversaries, Never Let Me Down remains one of the biggest outliers in Bowie’s catalogue for a specific reason. He knew that there was something wrong by the time he was finished, and given how he has slagged it off in recent years, most people are better off skipping out on this ironically titled record.
1. Pop – U2
What U2 managed to achieve coming out of the 1980s is nothing short of miraculous. There were certain rules in place once artists like Nirvana started storming the charts, and most of those rules meant that someone like Bono had no right to show his face as a rock and roll god anymore. Time was kind to the Irish legends on Achtung Baby, but that post-modern irony can only go so far when you actually start making disposable dance music.
Zooropa had already signalled that the band hadn’t stopped taking chances, but Pop is what happens when Bono listens to artists like The Chemical Brothers and decides to do the same thing, which amounts to nothing much more than a half-hearted drum and bass record half the time. Even though ‘Discotheque’ can be played for laughs these days, the rest of the album runs everything the group can think of into MIDI-effects software and hopes for the best half the time.
And whereas ‘The Fly’ persona seemed like a genuine critique of rock and roll stardom, hearing Bono still croak on about the pressures that surround being a rockstar felt like the equivalent of humble-bragging by saying that he doesn’t have time to pay off his luxurious mansions by the time tax season rolls around. There’s nothing wrong with change as long as it’s done right, but given how many cooks were in the kitchen on this occasion, it makes complete sense why U2 needed a complete system upgrade on All That You Can’t Leave Behind.
