10 albums that fans fell out of love with
Every blockbuster album usually has some degree of hype around it. Even though fans might not be as hot on their favourite act on a handful of projects, it usually takes that whirlwind to make people go absolutely nuts when an album rollout starts. Once everything died down, though, there came a point when artists like Oasis started to get some strange looks from people looking back on their records.
While the first taste of all these projects was fun, the aftertaste didn’t really sit well with fans. The replay factor might certainly have a hand in it, but the reason why no one wanted to listen to them was that they started to pick up on lines they weren’t OK with, either because of too many dated references or lyrics that were a lot more questionable than they thought when they first laid ears on it.
Then again, more than just the content can change a person’s opinion on an album. It usually comes down to how the people are presented with it, and if an artist did everything they could to destroy their goodwill, it’s a little hard to go back and listen to an album that’s all about them trying to garner some sympathy from the audience all over again.
Still, that’s not to say that a handful of songs still hold up, but the entire project tends to feel just a little bit hollow when people begin to look into the future. It’s one thing to have a great start, but the music world is all about the marathon, and each of these records was a sign that the biggest acts in the world might not actually go the distance.
10 albums that fans fell out of love with
10. Goblin – Tyler the Creator
The entire premise of the hip-hop scene could learn a thing or two from what Tyler the Creator has done with his career. He had started out as a person that no one wanted to be within three feet of while he was rapping, and suddenly, he turned himself into one of the single most vulnerable lyricists ever to touch a pen in the modern age. So when you know the truth about what Tyler is all about, going back to Goblin feels a little bit strange.
Because as much as the beats still work fairly well and the influence from people like The Neptunes is a breath of fresh air from most 2010s hip-hop, hearing Tyler sing about being a raging psychopath and casually dropping homophobic slurs tends to feel a little bit strange after he came out as a gay man and tried to make peace with the way that he treated both himself and the gay community.
Sure, it’s easy to look at it the same way someone looks at a 12th-grade bully who just learned what their new favourite swear word is, but is it really something worth putting down on wax? I mean, it’s going on his permanent record, and the circumstances it takes to enjoy a record like this are incredibly hard to manage.
9. Press to Play – Paul McCartney
For most Paul McCartney fans, there has never really been a true slump in his career. There have been peaks and valleys, but not really anything that could be called an all-time stinker among any of his records. It just comes down to what’s middle of the road, and while there’s a good idea in Press to Play, the songs are nowhere near good enough to save it from being boring.
People may have been lined up to bash McCartney when he released Give My Regards To Broad Street, but this record just feels like him trying to become hip with the kids and coming off as incredibly trite. There are half-decent licks across most of the album, but even though it sounded current then, hearing a song like ‘Stranglehold’ feels more like a bunch of dads getting together at a bar rather than a timeless classic.
Whereas ‘Angry’ does give a little bit more punch to everything, the majority of the album feels like a major career stumbling block for McCartney before bringing in Elvis Costello to help on his future projects. At worst, it’s just a little bit sleepy, but if it’s from someone who used to be a Beatle, nothing that they do should be remotely sleepy.
8. Make Believe – Weezer
Not every album on this list has to do absolute gangbusters right out of the gate. Even if millions of fans liked what their favourite artist put out at the time, there were more than a few polarising releases that got people talking even upon release. That didn’t stop Weezer from getting one of their biggest hits out of ‘Beverly Hills’, but Make Believe as a whole tends to feel like one of the more neutered versions of what the nerd rock gods could do.
While it’s certainly no Raditude by any stretch, Make Believe suffers from being one of the most radio-friendly Weezer albums in all the wrong ways. They were never exactly Slayer when it came to their deep cuts, but every track feels like it’s intentionally stifling itself in an attempt to get on the radio or a soundtrack to some early 2000s family movie.
The worst offender has to be ‘Perfect Situation,’ which has one of the best melodies Rivers Cuomo ever wrote, only to land on a chorus that has absolutely no words. You can give them points by going for a more basic appeal, but there’s a fine line between being universal and leaving a song feeling toothless.
7. Vapor Trails – Rush
Rush were never been afraid to test their audience when they pick up a new record. If you look at any of their records from the 1970s, no one was preparing themselves for a song as intricate as ‘La Villa Strangiato’ and expecting to hear it played on the radio. Rush could have cared less about the charts, but what was supposed to be their grand return actually turned into a nightmare to listen to.
And it virtually has nothing to do with the songs. No, seriously. Looking at it objectively, Vapor Trails is probably up there with Rush’s best records, as Neil Peart talks about the tragedies of the last few years and tries to nurse himself back to stable mental health. But there is a turd in this punchbowl, and that is the production.
For anyone who picked up the album on the first day, may God have mercy on your eardrums, since most of the album fell victim to the loudness and ended up leaving many people with throbbing eardrums as a result. Rush wasn’t letting up for a second, but for any audiophiles, there’s a reason why people only bother with the remixed version of the record these days.
6. Red Hot Chili Peppers – Red Hot Chili Peppers
The story of the Red Hot Chili Peppers trying to hold onto a lineup would take all day to dissect in one article. Suffice it to say that the band has been a little bit unstable, and it took all the way up to around The Uplift Mofo Party Plan before they had any kind of lineup that worked. Until then, they would be a little bit lost in the woods, and their debut is no greater indication of a group trying to figure out what the hell they’re doing.
While they already went through production hell trying to work with Gang of Four’s Andy Gill, hearing the Peppers without Hillel Slovak in the early days just doesn’t feel right. Since he had to return to his original group What is This?, along with drummer Jack Irons, half the album sounds like the group is just playing a jam session rather than fleshing out any proper songs.
If anything, the demos from the sessions actually sound a lot better than the real thing, with far less echoing production and everyone sounding a lot tighter than before. The early days of the Peppers are a bit of an odd fascination for people who just know hits like ‘Dani California’, but for those wanting to take the deep dive, don’t be surprised when you end up liking the demos more than the original thing.
5. Kids See Ghosts – Kids See Ghosts
Everyone can appreciate the moment when a good artist finally seems to be at peace. It may have taken a while for them to sort themselves out, but someone coming to a point where they feel comfortable inside themselves is hardly ever a bad thing. But it comes down to whether someone can keep that up, and the reunion of Kid Cudi and Kanye West after years away felt so good for that handful of years that people could appreciate it.
Because for as much love and peace of mind is sprinkled throughout Kids See Ghosts, it’s a bit difficult to see it as a victory lap considering what both men have done in recent years. Since Cudi’s rise on this album, he has gone on to make good music while being heckled by West’s fans who insist that everything that he has ever done couldn’t possibly measure to what their idol did.
And as of right now, the less said about West’s extracurricular activities, the better, but given his new rollouts, hearing him talk about not feeling pain anymore feels hollow coming from someone who has done almost everything he can to inflict pain on people that don’t align with his belief system. These days used to be all about self-discovery, but reality is much more disappointing than its ambitions.
4. American Dream – Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young
Most rock fans had made their peace with the fact that Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young were probably never going to get back together. The core trio still jammed occasionally, but the amount of hell that David Crosby raised on his own was enough to keep him at death’s door through the first half of the 1980s. Crosby did get clean, though, and Young’s return to the group for one last ride was everything people could have asked for, in theory.
In reality, though, American Dream feels like the equivalent of a bunch of dads getting together after knowing each other back in high school. Sure, they still have those memories to share, but not all of them can play nice like they used to. Young does deliver a handful of decent songs, but Nash’s overly sentimental side and Stills’s lack of decent tunes led to the entire album feeling toothless.
Considering how many 1960s artists were getting a second wind during the late 1980s, it feels like Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young were getting resurrected by default instead of by design. The sales might have been fantastic, but looking at the songs that made it on the charts, this was far from the American Dream that many had been promised back in the days of Deja Vu.
3. 3 Years 5 Months 2 Days In the Life of – Arrested Development
The era of early-1990s hip-hop usually had a clear dividing line when it came to what style people were into. There was an emerging alternative rap scene with people like A Tribe Called Quest, but the minute people heard the likes of Snoop Dogg and Ice Cube, it was impossible to deny that gangsta rap was about to take over. Arrested Development were still not bad for an alternative rap act, but if you peel back the layers of their album, you’re bound to find a few really questionable lines.
Outside of their frontman being named Speech, some of the core tunes from the record don’t really hold up to the passage of time. A tune like ‘Mr Wendall’ is supposed to be worldly and wise about the truths of life, but the kind of preachiness that they talk about in the song comes off more like a condescending kid who claims to have gone to one class on ethics and now has all the answers to life.
‘Tennessee’ is still an all-time jam, but the minute that people started listening to albums like The Chronic, this felt like the group was trying to sell a kind of revolution that had no business existing after 1994. Someone like Q-Tip could reach across the aisle and work on a project like Nas’s Illmatic, but if anyone brings Arrested Development up as a core figure of 1990s hip-hop, there’s no way to avoid looking dorky.
2. A Momentary Lapse of Reason – Pink Floyd
Can we just appreciate the fact that Pink Floyd was able to survive past The Final Cut? The entire premise of Roger Waters owning the rights to the group’s name was transparently flimsy, and if the group managed to carry without him, that should be seen as any kind of success story. They did need some time to work out the bugs, though, and A Momentary Lapse of Reason probably sounded a lot more slick back in 1987 than it does now.
Despite working on projects by the biggest names in 1980s music like Kate Bush, David Gilmour sounds lost in the woods throughout most of the project, usually taking the core sound of Pink Floyd and ramming it through many effects boxes. The production also doesn’t do it any favours, with tracks like ‘Learning to Fly’ sounding so much better in a live setting than on the proper record.
It also doesn’t help that Richard Wright isn’t a full member of the group anymore, with the lack of keyboards making it feel like a glorified solo album for Gilmour. Since Waters had his unofficial solo album in the group with The Final Cut, this might have just been a way for the band to regroup before finding some new life on The Division Bell.
1. Be Here Now – Oasis
It’s common for almost anyone to reel back on their opinions of their favourite acts. Sometimes there’s a band that you loved with all your heart when you were 13, but after the passage of time, those lyrics come off more adolescent than anything worth remembering. That’s over time, though, and there hasn’t been a more drastic pivot from love to hate as it was with Oasis on Be Here Now.
From the moment that the record was released, it had already been hyped up to the moon as one of the greatest records committed to tape. Once people got over the walls of noise on every song and started listening, they realised that they bought one of the more bloated projects in Britpop history, featuring songs that went on for far longer than they probably should have.
There are still the makings of a decent Oasis album in here, but the overproduction tends to swallow nearly all of them before they properly get off the ground. It was probably Noel Gallagher’s plan to sound overblown since they were the biggest band in the world, but this is where the rug was pulled out from under the group for good.
