Thread 127496054

why is this band underrated and overlooked compared with Zeppelin or Sabbath?

I like BOC but they're nowhere near as good or consistent as Zeppelin or Sabbath

Weak songwriting

Critic favorite because their manager/main songwriter was a critic so that knocks them down a peg. Always do opposite of what critics say.

>>127496054 (OP)
they did something to piss off the industry in the early '80s. In '81 they had another smash hit on an album that could've been the entire soundtrack to the Heavy Metal movie, and were headlining football stadiums. then total fucking obscurity. strange.

>>127496067
their stage show and presence blew away Sabbath on the 1980 tour.

>>127496136
The band members said that they simply got displaced by newer groups like Van Halen as the 80s were beginning.

>>127496054 (OP)
not enough cowbell

>>127496054 (OP)
A FIRE OF UNKNOWN ORIGIN TOOK MY BABY AWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY

>>127496070
Astronomy > your favorite song

>>127496067
well, uh, I don’t agree

>>127496054 (OP)
No mystique. They may be a good band, but they're still just a band.

aura farmers

The guys were massive sexless dorks. Nobody who listened to this band got laid.

For every great moment they had they had albums that were 75% filler tracks. Including the OP.

>Cities On Flame
>Before the Kiss
>and a bunch of filler

>>127496054 (OP)
this band is not good
it is a bad band
their music is bad

For me it's Quicklime Girl (Mistress of the Salmon Salt)

>>127499878
Secret Treaties is supposedly their best album and half the tracks are cookie-cutter forgettable 70s rockslop

Aerosmith, Zeppelin, and Sabbath had entire albums without filler or at most one filler track. BOC didn't come close.

>>127499878
that whole album is kino and comfy as fuck. then came the last days of may is great.

>>127499948
>Aerosmith
shit sucks

>>127499889
Fuck you

>>127500451
First three or four are decent

>>127496054 (OP)
Better melodic sensibilities and capabilities than Sabbath and far less obnoxious than fucking Zeppelin lmao. First 3-4 albums are great with lots of great tracks after that mostly. Flaming Telepaths/Astronomy is in the upper echelons of rock music's pantheon for those who value quality.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROG2Vy55_1c

>>127496054 (OP)
their peak albums (the first 3) are too high IQ for average rock heads, and too heavy for proggers
after that they became more accessible but also less consistent, more of a singles band

>>127496054 (OP)
I mean… it’s Sabbath and Zeppelin.
That being said, BÖC carved a pretty distinct niche for themselves on 70s AOR radio and among the hesher/heavy metal tire-kicker burnout market… [pic rel] was pretty fucking beloved at the time.
And rightfully so: it’s one of the great hard-rock live albums full stop.

Weirdly influential too. The Minutemen loved them some Blue Öyster Cult… same with the Metallica guys… Kurt Cobain had a song off SOME ENCHANTED EVENING (the live “Godzilla” or “Kick Out The Jams”?) listed in his ‘Journals’… hmm, not bad for a two-hit-wonder 70s biker-rock band all things considered.

>>127496054 (OP)
They're a troll band, they just do what they pleased when they wanted. Just look at their 2020 album, they're just riffing about anything they please and yet it's good, with zero pretentions

No consistency, charismatic frontman and consistent vision.

They have many great songs but not one defining album, closest is probably Fire of Unknown Origin or Secret Treaties.

>>127499637
>Astronomy (Imaginos version)

>>127499878
Redeemed is my favorite song on that album. Unironically.

They’re ugly and therefore not that marketable to gullible teenage audiences

this album is phenomenal and i want to thank Order of the Solar Temple (which no one here will know) for getting me into them via their cover of Dominance and Submission
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uf5ja-GEizY

>>127503029
is this a christgau bot?

Okay, we know their top song is either Astronomy, (Don't Fear) The Reaper or Veteran of Psychic Wars, but what is their most slept on?

My vote goes to Magna of Illusions. Imaginos is an awful album and barely a BÖC one, produced in an ugly way, but the songwriting can be amazing - people like In The Presence Of Another World or The Siege and Investiture of Baron von Frankenstein’s Castle at Weisseria but Magna of Illusion is mostly forgotten, when it's a pretty great story in a song format.

>>127505285
was always partial to E.T.I. myself

>>127505473
They always play E.T.I.

>>127505285
Then Came the Last Days of May should be as famous as Hotel California

>>127496067
This, tone alone they don't stand out like sabbath or zeppelin. Few great tracks but that's about it. And I've heard a good 5 of their albums

>>127506947
cursed with overall bad recordings, most of them are incredibly weak with low levels
I almost always listen to their live stuff when I listen to them at all
Extraterrestrial Live is kino

>>127506995
That Veteran of the Psychic Wars solo is genius

>>127496054 (OP)
Zeppelin and Sabbath were something completely new and different when they came.
BÖC was a great band, but there were already 1000s of hard rock bands around when they did their first album.

I used to mix them up with Kansas alot

>>127499948
Aerosmith blows my mind how old they are. They sound like their first record would be 78 or maybe 77 but they go back to 73. Guess that means they sounded ahead but to me it means they're the weaker band

>>127507176
>their first record would be 78
kek they were practically cashed out by then
kind of crazy their original run was really only six years

>>127505285
their top song is either Diz-busters, Dominance and Submission or Flaming Telepaths

They were still more of a psych band on the first album, that's my favorite

>>127496054 (OP)
pretty much all hard rock from the 70s that isn't sabbath, zeppelin, acdc, ect is underrated. whens the last time you talked to a person below the age of 40 about budgie, atomic rooster, or wishbone ash?

for me its UFO and Blue Cheer

>>127509804
same holy shit

>>127507205
>>127507176
Jack Douglas's production on the classic 70s albums was brilliant hardly any other hard rock albums of the period sounded that audiophile.

>>127506995
The first album sounded pretty good but most of the time they did sound like they were recorded on a portable cassette player.

>>127509789
>wishbone ash
rock with class, which is exactly why the peasants that comprise of most of rock's fanbase have never even heard of them let alone discuss them.

There's The Rub [MCA, 1975]
The great journeyman English blues-cum-heavy band of which it has been said "When they stand onstage and wield their guitars, it is as though they're brandishing swords," until they start digging in and you realize it's more like shovels. D+

case in point

>>127509903
like a lot of their peers WA had shit production and would just try to recreate their live sound on the albums

Daily reminder that if every critic were shot and thrown in a mass grave, the music world wouldn't suffer or be altered in the slightest.

>>127509843
yeah I hadn't listened to any of their studio records in years but I played a bit from a few of them today and that was my take away that they sounded kind of weak overall

not everything of course, Reaper and Burning wouldn't have been hits if they sounded like shit

Rocks [Columbia, 1976]
Dave Hickey compares the teen crossover of the year to a Buick Roadmaster, and he's right--they've retooled Led Zeppelin till the English warhorse is all glitz and flow, beating the shit out of Boston and Ted Nugent and Blue Oyster Cult in the process. Wish there were a lyric sheet--I'd like to know what that bit about J. Paul Getty's ear is about--but (as Hickey says) the secret is the music, complex song structures that don't sacrifice the basic 4/4 and I-IV-V. A warning, though: Zep's fourth represented a songmaking peak, before the band began to outgrow itself, and the same may prove true for this lesser group, so get it while you can. A-

>>127509846
so some people believe you get more out of songs about kicking ass, rocking out, and plundering teenage pusi than Wishbone Ash's Renaissance Faire LARP big deal

Cowboy Carter [Parkwood/Columbia, 2024]
Not a country album--without too much fuss we've gotten that straight. Just a confidently eclectic pop album with countryish flavorings and countryish provocations that claims and indeed establishes that our greatest female pop singer, who we know is also a pretty darn good songwriter, has a fair claim on that fiefdom. Her songwriting does peter out slightly for the last five or so of 25 (CD!) tracks, but for the most part the impressive variety of these songs only strengthens her not so audacious claim. She sings as a mother, a daughter, a sister, a descendant, an inheritor, and a sexpot. She enlists ever-obliging 90-year-old Willie Nelson, outclassed 28-year-old Post Malone, a sexy Miley Cyrus, a delighted Dolly Parton, and Paul McCartney's "Blackbird" in her quest and gives ample room to 81-year-old special guest Linda Martel, who became the first Black woman to (briefly) crack the Grand Old Opry half a century ago. Epochal? Maybe, maybe not. But a hell of a good record. A

>>127510016
Fuck off Gene Simmons.

>>127509903
i hate this faggot so much

In the Lonely Hour [Capitol, 2014]
Only when I finally bought the CD did I realize how well this pleasant pop I'd been MP3ing through my skull cohered as a self-portrait. This Sam Smith fella is a needy man, insecure about love as all of us are and more candid about it than most. And though manly types may scoff at his pleasing to infernally hooky tunes, not one song approaches self-pity. Both vocally and verbally, they offer the kind of emotional complexity about sexual romance's ins and outs that good pop captures better than good literature, where cynicism is such a folkway. But having established that baseline, let me single out my favorite, the lead "Money on My Mind," an emotionally complex reflection on his record deal. And let me add that the four OK-to-excellent extras on the deluxe edition dilute the original album's effect. A-

Watermark [Geffen, 1988]
A new name with a pedigree--she brought her family's upmarket Irish folk concept Clannad into the synthesizer age before leaving to pursue her own economic interests. Whilst humanizing technology, perpetrating banal verse in three languages (I'm guessing about the Gaelic after reading the English and figuring out the Latin), and mentioning Africa, the Orinoco, and other deep dark faraway places, her top-10 CD makes hay of pop's old reliable women-are-angels scam. At least the Cocteau Twins are eccentric. At least ELP were vulgarians. D+

When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? [Darkroom/Interscope, 2019]
Slotting this self-created 17-year-old as pop computes musically and commercially while reminding us how amorphous that once snappy term has become. Her soprano too diminutive for vocal calisthenics, her sensibility too impressionistic to bother mapping out track-and-hook bliss points, Eilish is a home-schooled Highland Park weirdo whose darkly playful version of teen-goth angst had already captivated millions of young weirdos-in-potentia before this electro-saturated debut album put in its bid for the rest of us. Seldom catchy in any conventional sense, every one of these 14 tracks entices the ear anyway, from "Bad Guy"'s "duh"s to "Xanny"'s blown speaker cone to the shuddering sound-pit that swallows "You Should See Me in a Crown" to the plinked piano of "All the Good Girls Go to Hell" to the tunefully cooed "Wish You Were Gay," and it keeps going. Only then it closes shut when one of the least self-glorifying suicide songs ever sets up a finale comprising songs titled simply "I Love You" and "Goodbye"--each quiet, each pretty, each what it says, each sad without ever turning gruesome or crossing its fingers. A

1000 gecs [Dog Show, 2019]
I lack both the expertise and the intrinsic interest to judge how well this file-sharing ex-St. Louis duo hitch up "the overwhelmingly scattered trends of 2010s digital music culture," as Pitchfork's wan 7.4 put it. But my mind-body continuum informs me that a good half of these 10 songs in 23 minutes activate my funnybone. Are there really digital music obsessives so stuck up that they don't think the world is a better place when an electronic munchkin squeaks the praises of their baby's ringtone? Who aren't cheered when a different munchkin purloins Little Nas X's "horse"-"Porsche" rhyme? Kids, please. A-

>>127509846
i hate their prog shit but their later 70s stuff is smooth like good scotch. gets the panties dropping too

When I listen to their albums awake I find them just okay but when I'm half asleep I actually think "wow that's pretty good"

>>127496054 (OP)
Calling BOC underrated, no matter the context, is so fucking retarded that I feel sleepy from it.

>>127496054 (OP)
I would say they're normally rated. Love their first three albums but Secret Treaties is the only one that can hang with Zep

>>127506806
This or the Red & the Black