10 albums that started a downward slide for great bands
The moment any rock band starts to experience massive success, it seems as though an invisible clock begins to tick. While artists may enjoy the adulation, they often remain unaware that the countdown has started until it reaches its end. Whether it’s a disastrous live performance or a significant drop in the quality of their music, some bands never fully recover. Albums like those from Oasis marked such a steep decline that even once-great groups struggled to bounce back.
Let’s start with the easy way of bands not recovering: some of the albums are responsible for outright breaking them up. Despite being one of the biggest names in music, tensions can get fairly heated when working on some of the tunes, and the minute that someone starts to speak out of turn or air their grievances, it doesn’t take long for everyone to leave the studio and not speak to one another ever again once it’s put out.
Then again, the more interesting ones are the artists that soldier on after these failures. Although they do have their fair share of highlights afterwards, something had messed with the formula far too much for anyone to be invested like they once were, which normally leads to people either getting bored or tuning out the minute that they start to forget about the good old days.
Even though most can continue on from one album that didn’t pan out, most were far too ill-equipped to deal with the fallout behind these projects. Suddenly, people had discarded them as yesterday’s news, and they would be spending the rest of their lives trying to match what they had done on their previous records.
10 albums artists never recovered from:
10. No Fun Aloud – Glenn Frey
It doesn’t seem fair to punch down on an album that is someone’s artistic debut. Most people are just happy to get something off the ground in the first place, so saying that the record is a downward slide on principle isn’t always the best first impression. But looking at where Glenn Frey had been before No Fun Aloud, he was going to be seeing nothing but diminishing returns until the Eagles started getting back together.
That’s not to say that everything on this album is downright terrible. There are fleeting glimpses of what could be great Eagles songs if gone through the communal mindset, but listening to them apart from each other, Frey sounds like he’s desperate to have something remotely close to ‘Tequila Sunrise’ or ‘Already Gone’ but can only settle for passable soundtrack fodder like ‘The Heat is On’ and ‘You Belong to the City’, none of which are on the standard version of the album.
Frey would spend a lot more time trying to distance himself from California rock, but listening to later entries like ‘True Love’, it was clear that he needed the group way more than he realised. While the Eagles had a nasty reputation of being boring to some casual rock fans, Frey’s debut was proof that he was about to become the favourite of many disgruntled dads for his solo years.
9. Give My Regards to Broad Street – Paul McCartney
It could be argued that Paul McCartney never really had an outright dud in his discography. Many fall under the mantle of strictly boring, but the fact that Macca could have made it to the start of the 1980s and still get songs on the charts like ‘Ebony and Ivory’, he was clearly doing something right. But when he decided to go back into the vaults and dust off some of his old tunes, Give My Regards to Broad Street began his embarrassing period.
It’s not like McCartney didn’t have a valid reason to do this, though. Some of The Beatles’ masterworks had never been played live or reimagined, and hearing him cobble together tracks like ‘Eleanor Rigby’ and ‘Here There and Everywhere’ would have at least been interesting if given the right amount of care. In terms of new compositions, ‘No More Lonely Nights’ was the minute that most fans realised that he started to take a few too many liberties with what could be done with straight-ahead rock.
From there, albums like Press to Play and Flowers in the Dirt suffer from being way too middle-of-the-road, as if he was trying to take a few cues from Bruce Springsteen and try to be the everyman in a rock and roll outfit. But no amount of casual rock and roll will ever convince anyone that McCartney is only a normal guy, and when listening to later boring cuts like ‘The World Tonight’, McCartney is clearly still shaking out the cobwebs of what Give My Regards to Broad Street started.
8. Make Believe – Weezer
Every Weezer fan has had to accept at some point that the group started to make some questionable music. As much as people like to be ride or die for some of the meme-able moments of Rivers Cuomo, not everything that he touches has been golden, especially if you look at the collaborations he made with AJR. But while Make Believe is far from the worst thing in the world, its success is where Cuomo’s first bad ideas were planted.
The entire premise behind Make Believe was initially to blend Pinkerton with The Green Album, but in trying to make the perfect mix of their styles, Cuomo shot himself in the foot and put emotionally gripping songs next to tunes that could have been considered throwaway on even the most lacklustre pop-rock album like ‘My Best Friend’ or ‘Freak Me Out’. But what do we know when the album did major numbers?
Money speaks for itself, and when ‘Beverly Hills’ did all-star numbers on the charts for a rock band at the time, that meant that Cuomo was given free rein to get weird on every project before eventually understanding the error of his ways. The road to hell is paved on good intentions, though, and no matter how good Cuomo thought Make Believe sounded, it’s the reason why we had to suffer through ‘Troublemaker’ and 90% of Raditude in the late 2000s.
7. Second Coming – The Stone Roses
For many artists, a studio can be their best friend. Anyone can try to keep the fire burning on the live stage, but when you’re locked away and told to come up with something new from scratch, there’s no limit to what can be laid down on tape. The Stone Roses were more than willing to put in the work behind Second Coming, and yet their attempt to put out the next monumental rock album ended up sounding like the ramblings of a madman who spent too much time in the lab.
While nothing can touch what their debut did to the world of British guitar music, Second Coming has the makings of a great album that’s half the length as it is. Considering how many moving parts are on the album, though, many would swear that John Squire refused to take no for an answer, whether that meant throwing on different guitar parts or taking the basis of a potentially good song and stretching it out for much longer than it should be.
He definitely hit the mark when working on tunes like ‘Love Spreads,’ but seeing how the rest of the band bottomed out shortly after the album was released, it was clear that they had started to chase their own tail. Anyone can try to shoot for perfection, but once you make perfection the goal, that’s when artists go down a rabbit hole and then never find their way above ground again.
6. The Trilogy – Green Day
It’s never easy to gauge when an artist starts losing their momentum. That kind of downward slide can only be seen over time, and it normally gets all the more tragic seeing someone decay over years at a time. In the case of Green Day, though, it’s almost ironic that they plotted out their fall from grace by announcing all of them at the exact same time.
Although the group’s trilogy of albums in the 2010s was supposed to be about them going above and beyond anything they had done before, we got a clinic on how to burn an artist out as fast as possible. Billie Joe Armstrong was already not taking care of himself, and by the time the records were finally out, it was no surprise to see him start to crack under pressure, leading to his now-infamous tirade at the MTV Awards, where he mouthed off at the programmers for giving one minute to wrap things up.
Then again, Green Day was able to stop the fall a little bit on their next albums, with Revolution Radio giving them time to heal and Saviors being pretty great, all things considered. The climb back to the top is still possible, but after The Trilogy, it would be completely understandable for the most die-hard Green Day fans wanting to jump off for a little while.
5. No Line on the Horizon – U2
It’s almost not fair looking at the curve that many people grade U2 on. Considering the kind of mess that they made on Pop, most artists should never have any business showing their face again, but Bono has been able to lead them to even greater heights ever since the 1990s. While ‘Walk On’ and ‘Beautiful Day’ have earned their places as classics for the later period of the Irish icons, No Line on the Horizon was the first time that they realised that their boring streak could be profitable.
Whereas some pieces of How To Dismantle an Atomic Bomb could get a bit tepid, No Line on the Horizon is where all of the group’s momentum starts to grind to a halt. For a group that was born and bred in the punk tradition, you know something has gone very wrong when the heaviest thing is ‘Get On Your Boots’, which practically sounds like them doing an updated version of Elvis Costello’s ‘Pump It Up’ with a few modern production choices.
Even when looking at the highlights from later on in their career, they all have asterisks next to them. Songs of Innocence had the Apple debacle, Songs of Experience was even more dozy than the last one, and Songs of Surrender may as well be an exercise in building an entire condominium up one’s own ass. And if we all just acknowledged that this first one was boring, maybe they wouldn’t have hatched the plan to give NyQuil a run for its money later.
4. The Final Cut – Pink Floyd
Not every downward slide album is made the same way. Sometimes, people don’t have time to realise that they are falling when they have to contend with the problems that they have on the previous album, which normally means rewriting whatever they were working on next. And while Pink Floyd would make great music following The Final Cut, the entire premise of band camaraderie was dead in the water the minute that they began work on the follow-up to The Wall.
Their rock opera was already a massive undertaking, but the idea of making something equally as strong with the table scraps was like trying to make a finely cut sculpture with a butter knife. As much as David Gilmour’s solos do add some texture to the album, the whole thing feels like some passion project that Roger Waters should have saved for his solo career once he officially left the group in the mid-1980s.
After Waters left the fold, though, that messed with the formula a bit too much, leading to A Momentary Lapse of Reason sounding too much like a David Gilmour solo outing before The Division Bell put them on equal footing with their more forgettable undertakings in the pre-Meddle days. Pink Floyd still had a track record of making something that still scans as good, but hearing Waters’s screams on this album by accepted is the reason why Wish You Were Here was never going to be made again.
3. Tango in the Night – Fleetwood Mac
Not every band has to have the best morale to create classics. If anything, Fleetwood Mac is the prime example that even though an artist struggles, channelling that hardship into an album can produce solid gold like on Rumours. ‘The Mac’ still had the opportunity to create magic going into the 1980s, but the minute they decided to tour behind Tango in the Night, they would be out of commission for almost a decade.
While it would have been hard to reason with both Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, the guitarist’s refusal to commit to a tour led to one of the nastiest blowups between band members in rock history, including both he and Nicks getting into a physical altercation when having a band meeting. So what, though? They had formed without Buckingham, and they could do it again, right? Wrong.
Looking at Behind the Mask, the group sounded like they had the wind knocked out of them, and the less spoken about Time the better off most of us will be. It’s no one’s duty to make amends with their former flame and expect that everything will be alright, but the minute that Buckingham and Nicks were separated within the confines of the group, the Fleetwood Mac that many fans knew felt like a tribute act that happened to have a few original members.
2. Some Time in New York City – John Lennon
During the early 1970s, it felt like The Beatles were still too big to fail. Most people had an understandable curve on how to grade any of Ringo Starr’s albums, but even when Paul McCartney struck out with RAM, it took fans years to realise the genius on display in every single track. And since John Lennon was becoming the next voice of a generation, Some Time in New York City was supposed to be the album that turned him into the political radical position that Bob Dylan once held. Instead, what we ended up with was enough to leave even the most committed Fab fan confused.
Because the tale of this album is a tale of two artists: John Lennon and Yoko Ono. As much as the album does have some decent material from Lennon, much of the album has to be grade right down the middle, which leads to songs that attempt to blend the best parts of Imagine with the more experimental pieces of what turned up on Wedding Album or Two Virgins.
Although most people with a weak stomach should outright skip the live album, it’s hard to deny that Yoko actually smokes Lennon on a few of these tunes, including a bouncy power pop track in ‘Sisters O Sisters’. All of Lennon’s albums tended to reflect what his state of mind was like, but considering the lost weekend he was about to endure, Some Time in New York City was the calm before the storm right as everything was about to fall to pieces.
1. Be Here Now – Oasis
What’s the true cost of having a hit album? Although many people can spend their entire lives trying to chase that one magic moment where an album falls into place, it doesn’t really matter when the losses mount up so high. And while Oasis was poised to take over the world, it made no sense trying to put together an album that was as bloated as Be Here Now turned out to be.
Despite putting them at the centre of the music world for the entire year, it didn’t take fans long to reel back on what Oasis was doing. For all of the great anthems they had made before, what we got on this project was the most overblown version of them, complete with layers upon layers of guitar overdubs and takes that seem to verge on raw noise being crammed into your ears instead of anything most people would want to listen to.
A track like ‘Wonderwall’ worked because of its simple arrangement, but once Noel figured that the best way to make a record was to recreate ‘Champagne Supernova’ on every track, we got the sad husk of what could have been the band’s third iconic album. Be Here Now is still classic in its own right, but probably not in the way that most people would like it to be.
