Albums that would have benefited from being less produced
 

In my opinion those are albums with good songwriting but they would have been better with a more stripped-down production:

Tim Buckley - Goodbye & hello
St Vincent - Marry me
Pink Floyd - Dark side of the moon
The Beatles - Let it be
Nick Drake - Bryter later (at least on half the songs, the other half is fine as it is)

Feel free to post your own list :)

There are surely tons of other ones but that's the ones that crossed my mind.

I agree with let it be

I will also say

Experimental Jet Set Trash and No Star

Nevermind, definatly

and parts of Dirty too. Really dont like Butch Vig

REM's Around The Sun was bad

good thread idea

Syd Barrett - Barrett

J Dilla - The Shining

Bob Dylan - Blood On The Tracks

Sonic Youth - Rather Ripped
- Dirty

Common - Like Water For Chocolate

Blonde Redhead - 23

arcade fires neon bible
the cures disintegration

cant think of anything else at this time

I didn't think production was the problem with Rather Ripped.
The Cure's 'Disintegration' I only agree as far as how much more produced the 'pop' songs sound compared to the rest of the album. But then that's always been a problem with them anyway.

Blood on the tracks overproduced ? :confused:

I feel the songwritings very strong, a few exceptions, but generally pretty good. I just feel if they all sounded more like Helen Lundeburg and Eyeliner it would have been far better, and more recognisably Sonic Youth.

"whats your favourite cure album"
"the greatest hits of the cure"

yeah, agreed with you on that point. i dont have a problem with really any of the sy production on albums, maybe with nycg&f but not majorly. even dirty deserves the viggness of the sound, its a big album! rrs problem was the songs if i am brutally honest but its hard to be perfect........

id like to add in the last explosions in the sky album, too much emphasis on production rather than the actual music but i suppose they were trying to recapture the work on the world is not a cold dead place, a near faultless album!

exactly. my favourite tracks of this album are the bonus tracks! thats not a good thing surely.... oh and pink steam.

ummmmm, nirvana's in utero prolly would been cooler if it had been less polished, i still think its great though. pixies trompe le monde too.

Yes sir, you must understand my Dylan collection is mainly the 60s stuff, so it just comes as a bit of a shock to hear how production changed into the 70s. For me Dylan's voice is better suited to the production on, say, Another Side. Blood may not be overproduced, but it's not as underproduced as I like Dylan to be, if y'know what I mean.

I absolutely agree, I'd even go as far as to say Eyeliner and Helen Lundeburg were two of the greatest SY tracks. However, that said I also have a soft spot for Pink Steam, and Or I find very moving indeed.

Ok, from that perspective I get it.

"In Utero" doesn't sound the least bit polished. Did you mean "Nevermind"?
.. Anyway..
Interesting thread.
To be honest, I can hardly think of any albums -- any band that's worth its weight probably doesn't WANT their albums to be overproduced. And in cases of something like production.. I mean, it's always good when things sound good... a lot of bands could benefit from better production...
However, OVERPRODUCTION... 500 layers of guitar on a song that only needs, like, 2... all kinds of ridiculous effects where there doesn't need to be any.. frequencies only your dog could hear.. I can think of a few.. right off hand: A lot of the late-period Wipers albums are way too slickly-produced, almost candy-coated. The songwriting's not that great anymore, but the production is just too... shiney? Also goes for the late-period Husker Du stuff... when you're used to a lo-fi, gritty, trebly sound, putting a bunch of gloss over it can either be used for a very good thing or just totally conceal some of the hard edge from the earlier recordings. I think with those two bands, the latter happened.
Another example I think is the Mars Volta. I don't think they'd be a good band to begin with, but their production is definitely very, very questionable... I've never liked vocal tricks like the same singer saying something in the left speaker and then saying something after that in the right speaker, a kind of ridiculous random call-and-response that usually makes no sense in the context of the song.. Mars Volta does this a lot... they do some other things that are questionable, but that is one thing that annoys the shit out of me...
I'm also going to nominate Jesu, who uses way too many guitar layers and pitch-corrects his voice so much that it seems to make the work too bright and poppy in parts -- usually the songs are good enough that that doesn't matter, but I can think of some specific songs where the production does work against it.
I also agree about Girls Against Boys' "Freak*on*I*ca" and some of the mid-period Fall albums that have too many electronica flourishes...

Honestly, though, good production or bad production doesn't hide a bad song, but it isn't a pleasant listening experience...

Wincing the night away by the Shins is a good album but I dont think the songs quite suit the production apart from one or two cases

If the first Liars album had sounded more polished i think it would be alot better.

One of the reasons i dislike Wowee Zowee by Pavement is its such a scattershot album but the production is clear, it would benefit if it wasnt so polished.

...and finally. Ive always hated the production of Sister. Its crap. I dont like it. Noone agrees with me. Oh well.

Eh? The first Liars album is reeeeeeeally polished.. "mr youreonfiremister" sounds like it was produced to be a dance-punk hit for the ages !

it is polished to a degree yeah but i think it would be better if it was MORE polished, like a proper dance-y album.
Dont get me wrong, its dull as hell and the next two are two of my very favourties, but the production doesnt suit the music in my weighty opinion