Best band never to release a truly great album?

Lynyrd Skynyrd, unless you count the Gold and Platinum best-of.

The Kid,

Are you saying those are good albums? I sure think so. You may have good taste;)

Of course the first Stone Roses album is a classic and widely accepted as such,in the Music For The Millenium poll conducted in 1999-a survey of critics and public had the album in the top 5,some 10 years after it's release.

This is actually a great question,it's got me racking my brains which shouldn't take long.
Of course I think we can all think of songs or groups of songs we heard live by famous bands that when we heard the official recorded versions seemed lacking,likewise albums or arrangements of great songs that failed to deliver their potential when recorded but all the artists I can think of who did this (Dylan is infamous for not delivering in the studio and leaving great songs off of albums),did release great albums at earlier stages in their career.....................good question

Rosstaman, all on your list (w/the exception of BBA, whom I don't care about anyway - sorry!) released quite great ablums, IMHO ("great" not meaning flawless, which doesn't apply in artistic endeavors). Just what don't you like about "Seconds of Pleasure" or "I Just Can't Stop It" or even the "Blind Faith" LP, if you do indeed think that these are great groups?

I think that most bands deserving to be called great during the age of album rock had to make at least one or two great ablums, almost by definition. But I'll list some bands that I think, for various reasons, seemed stymied from making the album(s) they *really* could have made (although the shortcomings of their recorded work are probably a part of what endears them to their fans):

The Velvet Underground
The New York Dolls
The Flamin' Groovies
The Chameleons
Motorhead
The Pretty Things
Moby Grape

I hesitate to list actual punk groups like The Damned and The Dead Boys, although the criteria might apply, because the punk aesthetic was really antithetical to the crafting of great albums, and money was also lacking practically by design. And if you get into all the groups who lacked money because of how far underground they were (no major labels), you could list deserving bands all day long.

Then there are also the interesting cases of artists who only got one chance to make a big album in their prime, and basically delivered the goods, but bad timing or lack of a hit single doomed them to go nowhere - The Remains and Gene Clark come to mind.

And how about the groups that did achieve renown, got to record a few big records that generally fell short of the mark (and would have qualified them for this thread), lost their audience, but then went out with a genuine masterpiece of a swan song that didn't get noticed at all - like The MC5 ("High Time"), or The Zombies ("Odessey and Oracle").