10 Amazing Rock Albums With Terrible Production

Any great prog rock album tends to live and die on its production values. Since you're trying to make songs that are complex and the height of your musicianship, you're going to make sure that the fans can hear all of the technical skills you have on first listen. And you can definitely hear the musicality on display on Rush's Vapor Trails...just a bit too much of it.

When the Canadian icons were coming back from a long hiatus, this is one of the earliest victims of the loudness wars, with most of the songs sounding much too loud in the context of the record. This isn't just turning the guitar amps up a little louder to give the songs some teeth either. On some of the best tracks here, you'd swear that the songs are clipping the mics, leading to a whole bunch of distortion for you to listen to.

It also doesn't help that the album is really long, which makes you want to take a break for long stretches of time in between songs to let your ears recover. Though the songs in here are great, the band felt that the mixes needed touching up as well, which led to a remaster years later that sounded way better. On the day of release though, this is the kind of record that could give you a migraine if you weren't careful.