Growing Stale: 10 albums that get worse with repeated listens
The best albums ever made tend to age like fine wine. As much as they may have seemed like a product of their time upon release, what may have seemed like a mindless trend can often be considered ahead of its time for the next generation to carve out their own musical legacy. While it normally takes a few listens for a project to sink in, these records from artists like U2 seem to be actively malicious every time they come on the turntable.
That’s not to say that every song on them is terrible. There might be a handful of decent pieces among all of the records… it’s just that they don’t work as a proper listening experience. Whether not clicking thematically or having the ugliest production ever made, what started out as the greatest album ever at the time continued to spiral until it was considered a permanent stain on an artist’s career.
Let’s be clear, though. This isn’t just from the local artists that people would find down the street. No, these are legitimate artists who presumably had a marketing department behind them. They figured that it was better to make something with the slightest polish on it. Regardless of how many people may have bought it then, it didn’t take them long to figure out that they had been had.
It might not have made people immediately turn off the turntable, but the more you sit with these songs, the more you pick up on how gross it is from a sonic standpoint. It normally takes people just a few listens to figure out if a record isn’t for them, but once you’ve actually had the time to take it in, you start to hear the audible turds coming through a little clearer.
10 albums that get worse on every listen:
10. Father of All – Green Day
The cardinal rule of any good punk rock band is to play things from the heart. No one is safe in the world of rock and roll, and it takes the true punks a matter of seconds to figure out whether someone is playing something honest or contrived. Although Green Day didn’t really need to prove themselves as rock and roll mainstays anymore, Father of All feels more and more flabby on every listen.
Because for a second, you can almost see something like this working. The band had already embraced their theatricality on their rock operas, so why not go for broke on a project that’s nothing but a bunch of fast and loose garage rock tunes? While the odd song does at least reach those standards, every other track is a firm reminder of the band trying to capture their teenage angst despite pushing 50.
It also doesn’t help that Billie Joe Armstrong turns in some of the most lacklustre riffs of his guitar, including recycling some riffs that he already used on other Green Day outings. You can call it a recurring theme or a signature lick, but it’s never a good sign when all an album gives you is a desire to listen to a much better album.
9. Electronic Sound – George Harrison
The Beatles were never afraid of experimentation during their time together. For all the pop-minded songs they made during the 1960s, even tunesmith Paul McCartney was known to go down the rabbit hole into avant-garde songwriting every time the band made their studio creations. There is a line where experimentation goes too far, and once George Harrison unpacked the Moog synthesiser for the first time, fans got to hear a Beatle go wrong.
Whereas one could justify John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Two Virgins as being a decent document of the couple’s first years together, Electronic Sound just feels like being caught at a local clinic with novice musicians who are just figuring out how to operate a synthesiser. That’s not too far off from reality, either, with Harrison first acquiring the synth and making an entire record out of whatever he finds when he plugs in different patches to create new sounds.
Despite being an engaging listen or a subtle bit of ambience to put in the background, the album doesn’t get much better outside of that context, especially towards the end, where it sounds like an early-generation computer malfunctioning. No, your headphones are not broken… that’s just how it was supposed to sound.
8. Zaireeka – The Flaming Lips
For all Lips aficionados, this album does deserve to be on here to at least some extent. Then again, when listening to The Flaming Lips’ discography, Zaireeka is actually a decent listen that shows them pushing themselves even further into tripped-out psychedelia. It does have adventurous moments, but Zaireeka does have one fatal flaw…and it has absolutely nothing to do with the music.
When it was released, the entire project was put together on four different discs, with the intent of each one holding a different piece of the mix. While most artists have made extravagant albums that took an eternity to finish, this was just one compact listen that somehow needed four different systems playing simultaneously to get the full stereo image. Even if you needed a breather, you needed to ensure every system was turned off at exactly the same time so everything wouldn’t go out of sync.
It may have sounded fantastic once you got through it in one sitting, but for those who bought the different mixes upon release, when have you considered undergoing that same experience again? Sure, the idea of listening to music from an experimental perspective was a bit of a game-changer, but one shouldn’t have to take four different precautions before they even think about putting their favourite record on.
7. Devil Without a Cause – Kid Rock
Making fun of someone like Kid Rock right now is the equivalent of someone clowning on Justin Bieber back in his infancy: it’s too predictable. The amount of times that Mr Rock has seemed to put his foot in his mouth or made himself out to be an absolute jackass in the public eye is far too many times to count at this point, and it doesn’t seem that things are necessarily getting any better. When you look at the sales figures from Devil Without a Cause, it just becomes sad to think about all of the time wasted trying to get down one’s rap-rock chops.
Granted, that’s not to say that Rock doesn’t at least have some skills as an entertainer. He knows how to fill stadiums to this day, and for all its meatheadedness, ‘Badwitaba’ gets stuck in someone’s head once they hear it. With years of hindsight, the lyrics on half of these songs are downright reprehensible, with Rock singing about being a cowboy pimp from Detroit and wanting nothing more than to junk up his veins.
That’s not to say that artists can’t provoke every now and again. Some of the greatest art has been made out of poking fun at the established order, but a song like ‘Black Chick White Guy’ is still one of the most feral things that you will ever hear if you have any modicum of good taste. Rock stars might try to grow up every now and then, but someone who tries to sell off this kind of heinous activity should have never made it past their demo stages.
6. St Anger – Metallica
If Metallica decided to hang things up after the 1990s, there’s a good chance they would be talked about among the best in the business today. Although they are still a metal titan that isn’t going to be leaving any time soon, Metallica were never more omnipresent in people’s lives until then, sharing the stage with other pop titans at awards shows and being looked at as elder statesmen of the genre. They couldn’t do any wrong…or so they might have thought.
Then again, it’s hard to put the blame of St Anger squarely on the band. They were going through the worst shakeups a band could go through, and the fact that they survived to make another record is at least somewhat commendable. In order to save the group, though, they let go of some of that quality control and turned in one of the least polished records of their career, featuring pieces that are clipping the mics and James Hetfield trading in his gritty growl for a strange scream.
They may have been looking to go grittier on the album, but the lion’s share of the songs feel about eight riffs too long and should have been nixed the minute that Lars Ulrich decided that it was time to throw his snare out the window and never replace it. Metallica fans might still flock to the album, but when most of the metal community returns to it because of how incompetent it is, it’s not exactly getting the most glowing endorsement.
5. Chinese Democracy – Guns N’ Roses
There are usually a few warning signs that tip someone off that an album will be a bit of a rocky listen. Whether it’s a bloated runtime, obnoxious cover art, or questionable quotes leading up to the release, there are just as many things that can discourage them from buying it as they are encouraging them. Guns N’ Roses may have only put out the music that they were proud of, but the more people waited to hear Chinese Democracy, the more toxic the songs started to become.
Since the band (read as Axl Rose) had spent years trying to make the project his answer to Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, most of the songs sounded like a musical perfectionist was pouring over them. From the endless amount of guest stars to the tracks that go nowhere, most of the project feels like a chore to sit through on the first listen, as Rose tries his best to capture the spirit of the early 1990s more than two decades after the fact.
If you had fun going through the entire ride, you better like the idea of putting up with it for over an hour, featuring the occasional grandiose ballad in between songs that may as well be played in two completely different periods. It may have been poured over for years at a time and gone through so many different producers, but just because someone slaved over an album and put as much as they could into it doesn’t automatically mean it’s good.
4. The Final Cut – Pink Floyd
Some of the best artists reach that strange sweet spot in their discography where nothing can go wrong. The Rolling Stones had their time in the Exile on Main Street period, and no one would argue that Stevie Wonder’s turn on Songs in the Key of Life is still among the best music ever created. Pink Floyd may have had their time in the sun, but after the success of The Wall, someone told Roger Waters that he could do whatever he wanted on record.
This is strange because on first listen, The Final Cut doesn’t sound that much different than The Wall. The theatrical bent to the lyrics is still there, and hearing Waters sing in his dramatic cadence is still a welcome return. Once you start listening beyond the first handful of tracks, the amount of filler on the record is far too big to ignore.
Since most of the songs come from pieces that were initially thrown out of The Wall sessions, half of it feels like neglected pieces that should have remained on the cutting room floor, especially when Waters starts bringing the characters out with zero context for where they’re supposed to be in the production. The Final Cut is far from the worst album Pink Floyd made, but when looked at amongst their collection of classic and passable albums, it’s the one that hardly needs to exist.
3. Self Portrait – Bob Dylan
When you listen to a Bob Dylan record, you’re not just getting a song. From the way he sings to the cutting language he uses throughout every verse, one usually gets Dylan’s take on the world every time he opens his mouth, often relying on his tongue to take him from a humble songwriter to the voice of a generation. No one is really meant to have a “Cultural Voice” title in front of them, so once Dylan had it, he figured he would do whatever he could to shake it off.
Although Self Portrait warrants at least a few listens to see which songs work, it doesn’t take long for you to realise that Dylan has started to go off the rails. Outside of playing the traditional cover tracks like ‘Blue Moon’, Dylan struggles to really make a point throughout every piece, instead letting the words spill out like vomit on a handful of tracks and hoping they come together by the end.
That kind of approach might work in a psychedelic track, but it feels nothing but awkward when you hear that nasal voice come in. There’s nothing wrong with Dylan trying to mix it up a little bit whenever he makes a record, but after the first listen through Self Portrait, you’re better off cherry-picking the songs and making one coherent single LP on your own.
2. Summer in Paradise – The Beach Boys
All of the great Beach Boys songs usually come down to Brian Wilson’s genius. Compared to others who didn’t know the first thing about music theory, Wilson seemed to be the child prodigy of rock and roll, taking a handful of chords and an immaculate ear for harmony and putting together some of the most beautiful tunes ever written. After years of psychological abuse, though, the Beach Boys still needed an album, and Summer in Paradise was the moment the band decided they didn’t need Brian.
After ‘Kokomo’ blew up on the charts and became every music critic’s worst nightmare, Summer in Paradise is the sound of Mike Love trying to recapture that magic again. As hideous as ‘Kokomo’ sounded, the fact that it was catchy felt like a stupid miracle, and the idea of trying to put that into a song was not going to work, much less when you have only half of the Beach Boys and John Stamos on the drums.
Even for hardcore Beach Boys fans, it takes a strong listener to get through the first go-around of the song ‘Summer of Love’, which features Love trying his best to sound like a rapper and coming off like a 60-year-old man trying to show the kids these days what real music is like. For a man that famously told Wilson not to fuck with the formula, the fact that he was able to make half of this album with a straight face was delusional at best.
1. Songs of Surrender – U2
U2 have always had a reputation for being a little too high off their own egos. They may have helped a lot of people and been able to make the best music of both the 1980s and 1990s, but the pompous attitude and the self-righteousness of Bono made them look like they also enjoyed the smell of their own farts in their spare time as well. It’s not a sin for an artist to be a fan of their own work, but Songs of Surrender is the moment where a lot of U2 fans should draw the line.
Although the OG fans of the Irish favourites will be ride-or-die until the end, their latest reimagining of their classic songs is a complete butchering of the originals. While it’s easy to see where the band’s head was when making the record, they have replaced most of their greatest tracks with kitschy muzak versions, almost sounding like a version of MTV Unplugged with none of the backbone behind it.
The band did release statements along with the record about wanting to reinterpret their music for a new generation, but it’s hard to look at an album like this and see a group getting back in touch with their roots. This is the sound of an outfit coasting on easy mode and hoping their fans will buy it, and if they decide to go down this road even further, chances are they are going to disappear up their own ass and never return.
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