Who Are You is an album that has troubled me ever since I brought it home and listened to it for the first time. It is especially disconcerting that it should trouble me so much, because frankly, the last Who album I liked was Who's Next which is, after all, seven years old. Quadrophenia left me cold, but I respected it as an ambitious, almost heroic, failure and The Who By Numbers, which also left me completely unaffected, was conversely so non-ambitious and unassuming that its mere presence as a simple collection of songs seemed a plus. Who Are You, however, just gnaws at me, and I've been returning to it with a dark, almost demented fascination asking myself can it really be so bad? And more importantly, why?

It's that second question that ultimately forces me to conclude that the four ghosts pictured on the cover of...