10 albums too horrible to look away from
It’s hard for anyone to revisit albums that they know are going to be an absolute dumpster fire. It’s never easy seeing big-name artists fumble it so badly, but no one is perfect, and there are bound to be that handful of albums that never quite the mark like they are supposed to. If we’re using the same metaphor, though, bands like George Harrison went so far off the map that they managed to leave a crater where they once stood.
That’s not to say that these records on this list are without a little bit of merit, though. It’s easy to see what some of them may have been going for when they were released, but when looking at how badly they stuck the landing, it’s almost more entertaining to go back and see the severity of the plunge.
Then again, not all failures are built the same way, and some of the best examples on this list come from someone who tried a bold new sound and fell flat on their face. There can be passion leaping out of the speakers, but this is the difference between bands that are driven by something greater than themselves and those who ended up accidentally building an entire album up their own ass.
And the attitude isn’t much help, either, especially when most of these acts sound like they would rather be almost anywhere except in the vocal booth making their records. Every record on this list is the last one prospective fans might check out, but it’s not like they left us short of things to talk about when they were eventually released.
10 albums too horrible to look away from:
10. Squeeze – The Velvet Underground
Most of the world didn’t realise what we had on their hands with The Velvet Underground. Despite getting slagged off by nearly every music paper at the time, Lou Reed had pioneered what all kinds of alternative rock was going to sound like, whether that was creating noise rock on White Light White Heat or managing to bring that rock and roll sense of swagger to Bob Dylan-level lyrics on ‘Pale Blue Eyes’. So when the entire band decided to call it a day, that should have been where everyone hung everything up, but that’s not what happened.
No, Doug Yule somehow felt that he could keep everything going on his own, and by the time Squeeze came out, we were greeted with a version of the Velvets that was virtually unrecognisable. Although Yule did a great job in the second half of the band’s career, he sounds like he’s not ready to carry a mantle this heavy throughout the album, especially when he tries to reach for that same sense of swagger and manages to sound cute compared to Reed.
Because no matter how much Yule tried to put into his performance, The Velvets always thrived on doing what came naturally, and compared to their glory years, anyone knew this wasn’t the true Velvets. This was a bunch of boardroom executives getting together with Yule and putting out their idea of what a Velvet Underground album was supposed to sound like.
9. Forbidden – Black Sabbath
The fact that Black Sabbath chose to keep going for so long with multiple lineup changes is worthy of them being metal gods alone. As much as Ozzy Osbourne and Ronnie James Dio leaving should have killed them, Tony Iommi was always the guiding force steering them through everything, even managing to make some decent metal with Tony Martin behind the microphone. When Dio left for a second time, though, Iommi figured that the next phase of Sabbath’s career lay in the sounds of hip-hop.
Before people’s monocles started popping, it’s not like Iommi didn’t have merit behind this idea. The nu-metal boom was still beginning, and compared to the whining that Fred Durst did on half of his records, Iommi never forgot how to sound menacing whenever he strapped on a guitar. But when Ice-T came in for the collaboration ‘Illusion of Power’, the phrase oil and water would be an understatement, especially with the Body Count frontman sounding like he was storming in from a completely different song throughout the record.
While Martin’s voice reminds some hardcore Sabbath fans of the days when they were making abject power metal, the production also doesn’t help much, striking a balance between dad-metal and the kind of rock and roll that would make good background music at a wrestling match. Iommi still got away relatively unscathed when 13 began, but if not for him closing the book on their legacy, having this as the last original album could have sent chills up and down the spines of fans the world over.
8. Full Circle – The Doors
There’s no replacing someone like Jim Morrison in rock and roll history. Most rock and roll frontmen still were finding their feet in the 1960s, but as soon as The Doors began tearing up venues across Los Angeles, ‘The Lizard King’ became the archetype for every seductively strange rockstar that wanted to take on the world whenever they played. He may not have been the best musician in the world, but the minute that he left, it took everyone in the band far too long to realise they had lost the fulcrum of their band.
While Other Voices was at least an attempt for the remaining members to carry on with Ray Mazarek singing most of the songs, Full Circle is when the fans realised it wasn’t going to get better. At least ‘Tightrope Ride’ provided some lighthearted fun on the last record, but hearing Manzarek desperately try to croak out the same type of muscle that Morrison could is downright laughable when he starts going through tunes like ‘Good Rockin’ Tonight’.
Then again, there are some moments that at least sound mildly interesting, but they never come together like they should when that one special ingredient is missing. Like the Velvet Underground, this is a band that would have had trouble filling up a small venue with an album like this if they didn’t have the massive name recognition behind them.
7. Revival – Eminem
There tends to be a specific sell-by date for almost every mainstream artist. No matter what genre you fall under, there are usually a few years where someone can have their maximum impact before people start either getting bored or expect you to do the same thing every time they get one of your new records. While Eminem had many shining moments throughout his career, even Encore would have chuckled at what Slim Shady was doing on Revival.
Despite the rap icon’s Re- series was shaky at the start with Relapse, Recovery was some degree of decent, and even The Marshall Mathers LP II showed him hungry in a way that no one could have imagined from someone in the game that long. But instead of capitalising on that energy, Eminem threw everything out the window for Revival, instead making the kind of radio-tastic pop-rap that would have felt dated in 2009, never mind 2017.
And what’s even more hilarious is seeing Em getting passive-aggressive about everyone hating it, whether that’s claiming that it was a masterpiece or badmouthing rappers that were much better than he was at that juncture, like Tyler the Creator, on the follow-up album Kamikaze. Fans may have been a touch harsh on it at the time, but there has to be some bizarre scenario going on in Slim’s mind if he thought that an album where he compares one of his exes to a laxative was going to earn him a Grammy. We had reached a new era of hip-hop, and now the most dangerous alive seemed like the king of dad jokes.
6. Time – Fleetwood Mac
For Fleetwood Mac, there isn’t one setback that they couldn’t face head-on. They had lost Peter Green and Bob Welch before they had a bonafide hit to their name, but to borrow a phrase from Stevie Nicks, making albums Rumours allowed the music to wash them clean and figure out where their priorities were. Although Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham gave them a shot in the arm, seeing the band try to continue without either of them made for one of the most absurd albums of any soft-rock act’s career.
Then again, it’s hard to really blame any of the replacement members here. Bekka Bramlett was never going to be able to fill Nicks’ shoes no matter how hard she tried. Still, compared to the classic lineup, Time is a glorified cover band that happens to be playing original material. Even when Christine McVie comes in with a potentially great song, it’s all for nought when you realise that she never wanted to be there making the record.
Whereas every Fleetwood Mac classic had been known for making classics out of their inner pain, this was the closest that they ever came to creating a project that felt the same way that the production of Rumours sounded to make. It’s uncomfortable, it’s confrontational in a few places, and there’s no guarantee whether or not someone is going to walk out of the experience without a few scars.
5. Gone Troppo – George Harrison
George Harrison had a certain advantage as a songwriter than every other member of The Beatles. While it might have stung being relegated to only a few songs per album, getting the chance to see how John Lennon and Paul McCartney operate is the kind of masterclass most people would kill to have seen up close. While Harrison would ultimately put proper care into every song he wrote, that made it extra evident when it sounded like he didn’t want to be there.
Because throughout Gone Troppo, ‘The Quiet Beatle’ couldn’t be arsed to make anything in the studio. The previous album, Somewhere in England, was already a bit of a mess, but since he needed one more album out, this feels like Harrison doing whatever he could to throw some tunes together in the studio before going on vacation, which leads to some of the sunniest and downright goofiest tracks he ever made like ‘Baby Don’t Run Away’ and the title track.
Even when there are leftovers from early in his career, ‘That’s The Way It Goes’ is a more defeatist look at his advocation for faith, and ‘Circles’ is practically a Broadway show tune for a production that doesn’t exist. Most people knew not to expect anything too heavy from Harrison at this juncture, but considering how out of touch he was with the music business, the Traveling Wilburys couldn’t have started fast enough.
4. Ummagumma – Pink Floyd
Knowing Pink Floyd’s history, the time between Syd Barrett’s departure and Meddle is hard to listen to in places. It was clear that the band needed to transition to something different to keep everything afloat, but on every subsequent album, it was never clear what that new style would be. Although Ummagumma was a good concept for the band to flesh out the material, hearing the original disc is one of the most disjointed projects they had ever made.
Because everyone was still finetuning their songwriting sensibilities, the record feels like a song workshop where everyone takes their own side to find themselves. That probably explains why David Gilmour’s version is so disjointed, having only recently joined the band and having virtually no help from his bandmates when putting together the different pieces for ‘The Narrow Way’.
Even when getting to Roger Waters’s material, his songs are shockingly bad by his usual standard, either spending his time making avant-garde noises or the kind of fanciful tunes that give even the eccentric side of Barrett a run for his money. Most bands have to deal with this kind of growing pain whenever finding their sound, but rarely do any of them manage to find their way onto an album like this.
3. Two Virgins – John Lennon
When talking about the end of The Beatles, Yoko Ono tends to be treated far too harshly. Even though her presence at the studio may have hindered the band’s camaraderie, it’s clear that John Lennon would have never survived those sessions were it not for her providing that emotional support. If anyone were to make a case for her steering Lennon in the wrong direction, Two Virgins is probably the best candidate.
Because anyone even remotely familiar with The Beatles knew that this record was dead on arrival. Outside of being an avant-garde piece of sound design chronicling their first meeting together, most of the album is nothing but noise and screaming, with the odd addition of acoustic guitar thrown into the mix almost to remind everyone that this is made by the same person who wrote ‘In My Life’.
It’s not like Lennon didn’t realise it would be a challenging listen, though, saying that the full title was considered ‘Unfinished Music’ because it was meant to be thought of in the listener’s mind. That idea could have worked great with the right execution, but some fans who think ‘Revolution 9’ is the worst thing that any Beatle has ever done have no idea how blissful their ignorance truly is.
2. Unplugged 2.0 – Lauryn Hill
One of the biggest challenges of any artist gaining a following right out of the gate is to follow everything up. No one kicks off their career thinking that they’re going to be one of the biggest stars known to man, and once the awards start rolling in, that can either go right to the musician’s head or make them terrified of what to do next. In that scenario, fans either go in a different direction or flame out entirely, but Lauryn Hill did neither. She just picked up her guitar and gave us the most uncomfortable gig imaginable.
While The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill was still selling in droves, Unplugged 2.0 was meant to give fans that extra hit of new material. Even though many of the songs from Hill’s debut are untouched on this record, the originals she decided to play are revealing in all the wrong ways, usually capturing Hill in a bad place or featuring her having a meltdown midway through a song that feels more than a little bit voyeuristic if listened to for too long.
That’s before getting to the interludes, where Hill starts rambling about everything from the outfit she decided to wear for the occasion to her faith to her desire to abandon the music scene altogether because of her need to face reality. This kind of discussion would be perfect if it were in the confines of a therapist’s office, but listening back to Unplugged 2.0, it’s hard not to feel dirty knowing that the people getting Hill up on that stage are counting checks off of her breaking down.
1. Generation Swine – Mötley Crüe
There aren’t many bands that could claim to define the 1980s quite like Mötley Crüe. While they were certainly far from the best group of musicians in the world, hearing them kick ass along the Sunset Strip made them the poster children of rock and roll debauchery, especially knowing their stories about drunk driving and Nikki Sixx needing to get brought back to life after overdosing. This was a band timestamped in 1988, but seeing them try their hardest to get an alternative makeover is still one of the most unintentionally hilarious moves of the 1990s.
Since the entire rock scene was about being real, seeing them absent-mindedly throw every genre, they can think of into the mix and see what sticks are mystifying to watch in real-time. There are still traditional rock and roll tunes, but listening to them embrace the sounds of nu-metal on ‘Beauty’, sing a cheesy rock ballad like ‘Glitter’, and then still find time to try on their best Stone Temple Pilots impression on ‘Flush’ is downright disorienting.
Somewhere in here is that U2-style sense of rock and roll satire, but none of the members are that self-aware to deface their legacy as rock gods. Then again, you can’t fault them for being inauthentic. After all, the whole point of the 1990s was about being real, and if there’s one thing that they showed us on Generation Swine, it’s that they were absolutely terrified about whether the hell they would be considered relevant in a few months.
