10 albums worse than their reputation

<em>Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk (disc 2) -</em> Jeff Buckley

There’s no doubt that Jeff Buckley was a legend among men in the 1990s. The fact that anyone could have that angelic of a singing voice and still manage to make the most beautiful guitar lines almost doesn’t seem fair to be held within one person’s body, but the fact that we only had him for one proper album is the real tragedy of the 1990s after Kurt Cobain’s passing. But when you look at what he left behind for the rest of us, there are some pieces of his legacy that didn’t really need to be thrown out to the hungry listeners.

Make no mistake, Sketches for My Sweetheart The Drunk is a fantastic posthumous album with some fascinating tunes like ‘Yard of Blonde Girls’ and ‘Vancouver’, but when you look at the back half of the album, it gets more than a little bit uncomfortable. Buckley was known to be a bit more experimental with his songwriting, but given the mental state that he was in towards the end of his life, a lot of these pieces are downright harrowing to listen, especially on some of the demos where he sounds like he’s about to go absolutely insane by the time the song is over.

So while the initial album’s reputation is solid as all hell, make sure not to include some of these tunes in the back end as part of the essential playlist of Buckley’s classics by any stretch. He was a phenomenal talent and a true innovator in his field, and while the fans will take anything they can get, Buckley’s memory is worth far more than seeing him in the worst possible light that was shown on him.

<em>Damn Yankees – </em>Damn Yankees

It’s strange how the term ‘supergroup’ has gone hand in hand with the phrase ‘vanity project’ more and more often these days. As much as people like the idea of getting everyone of their favourite artists in the room to create, the fact that they are often lacking in any sort of chemistry is precisely the reason why these kinds of things never work out. You have to have people who can work off each other, but even when you had a half-decent cock rock band like Damn Yankees, things weren’t exactly the best rock and roll out there.

While critics knew to keep their distance from notable rock and roll poison like Ted Nugent, not even Tommy Shaw’s angelic voice could help diffuse any of the tension here. Shaw’s songs were always the saving graces of many of Styx’s finest albums, but when you put it next to a screaming guitar and a song like ‘Coming of Age’ that’s all about perving on an underage girl, you can see what it doesn’t exactly go over that well for people that want to actually follow the law half the time.

Even if you can look past the awful lyrics and the dreaded 1980s production, though, the fact that they decided to make a joke out of their old bands onstage by having ‘Uncle Ted’ take Shaw’s guitar after playing the opening notes to Styx’s ‘Babe’, only to smash the guitar into a million pieces. The whole thing might have been funny, but there should be a common rule that states that someone can only make such a stunt if they can actually make better music than the people they’re mocking.

<em>Songs of Surrender – </em>U2

There’s no shortage of reasons that many people can have for not caring for U2’s music. Bono and the gang haven’t been perfect throughout their catalogue, and there are more than a few times when their music could be confused with plain grey wallpaper if you’re not careful. But while there are many times where they could be transcendent, any critique of their modern era could be summed up in every single painful moment going on throughout Songs of Surrender.

Rounding out the Songs of… trilogy, the entire record is nothing but 40 tracks that consist of tunes that the band have made in the past, only this time with a much more dull arrangement behind them. What it amounts to is an Unplugged performance where not every instrument is unplugged, and whereas Bono’s voice sounded forceful and passionate on the original versions, you can hear him trying too hard to squeeze every bit of emotion out of it, like somehow the drab version of ‘Pride’ will awaken someone’s senses to how great the song actually is.

But, really, all this album serves to do is remind everyone of how great the original versions of these songs were and what a travesty it is to see them being dragged through the mud so unceremoniously. The whole thing may have been put together as a quasi-soundtrack to Bono’s autobiography, but if they are able to make pressing music about the political times on Day of Ashes, there’s no excuse for them to make something that sounded this lifeless. Because, as it stands, Songs of Surrender feels like listening to these classic songs as they go off to die.

<em>Scorpion – </em>Drake

Let’s just rip the Band-Aid off right now: Drake doesn’t have any classic albums. There are many tunes that he made in the past that will go off if you play them at a party, but considering half of his catalogue is just him talking about how sad he is and leeching off of whoever he can find to collaborate with, his music is practically the equivalent of doomscrolling through your ex’s old posts. But even if the world almost collectively handed Mr Graham’s ass to him when watching Kendrick Lamar demolish him, that doesn’t forgive him for making one of the most lethargic albums ever made.

But it’s not like we don’t know why Drake made Scorpion such a behemoth. His past records up until this point were going off the streaming model of making the album like a playlist, but whoever said that they needed over 80 minutes of him talking about how he’s in his feelings? And when all of the great singles from the record constitute him complaining about everything on ‘I’m Upset’ and trying to weasel his way out of his beef with Pusha T, it’s not like he’s coming out of the album looking like the victor by any means.

There are even a handful of great songs on there, but considering ‘Nice for What’ looks a lot different after a song like ‘Not Like Us’, it’s a waste of a perfectly good Lauryn Hill feature through the tune. No one needed to listen to this much music by someone who didn’t have that much depth to begin with, but compared to the biggest names of hip-hop, the fact that Scorpion helped get Drake into most people’s Top Five is a spit in the face to every emcee that came before him.

<em>Encore – </em>Eminem

Remember back at the beginning of this, when I said that there’s no album that was intentionally trying to be bad? The biggest names in music do have those few times where songs don’t work out or can’t meet the moment in the right way, but no one would go out of their way to make sure that every single person with functional eardrums hated their music, right? Well, guess what? Slim Shady didn’t seem to get the memo when he tried to follow up The Eminem Show in the 2000s.

The entire rise of Eminem was already one of the biggest events to watch throughout the 2000s, but the fact that Encore existed really put a spotlight on the childish behaviour that was all too real. A lot of his larger-than-life skits on his albums felt like watching some warped Saturday morning cartoon, but after a few of the initial songs for Encore got leaked beforehand, his way of remedying that was by punishing everyone who heard them by making songs that were intentionally terrible. On one hand, I can respect that, but making a song out of pure spite like ‘Big Weenie’ doesn’t mean people are going to like it, especially with that incessantly of a hook.

And while Encore is nowhere near Em’s worst album, the fact that it had so much juvenile energy behind it is what puts it on this list. Most people were used to Eminem being a bit more childish when he started filling half of his verses with dad puns after 2010, but after giving us a decent look into his psyche, seeing him try his best to lose his goodwill for his next album was never going to be any fun for anyone to watch.

<em>Two the Hard Way – </em>Allman and Woman

It can be incredibly dangerous to get into a relationship in the public eye in general. Most people like the idea of power couples whenever they talk about their favourite celebrities, but if we’ve learned anything from ‘Bennifer’, it’s that even though there is some electricity in the air whenever someone starts their relationship doesn’t mean that it translates into great art. And long before we all had Gigli to look back on as one of the worst movies of all time, we had the musical equivalent when Gregg Allman and Cher first got together.

Granted, Allman and Woman didn’t have to be terrible. Cher could collaborate with countless artists whenever she sang on her show, but even when she and Gregg start harmonising on the album, there is ZERO chemistry there. You can at least give Cher credit for trying, but when the song that seems to tug on the heartstrings the most is a cover of ‘You Really Got A Hold on Me’, it almost becomes tragic if you know the toxic nature of what Smokey Robinson was talking about on the original.

And since the couple would be history only a few months after the album came out, it’s no surprise that both sides didn’t really congeal into the greatest record. The power couple idea might work wonders for the tabloids, but even after people stop hearing about what their favourite stars are doing in their spare time, they’re not going to want to hear them desperately try to corner the market on love songs. Cher was determined to get this right, but even though both she and Allman bounced back, Allman and Woman was never a band that should have seen the light of day.

<em>Antichrist Superstar – </em>Marilyn Manson

There was no shortage of nihilism when it came to the 1990s metal scene. As much as people like to claim that grunge killed off a lot of metal bands, there was industrial rock right around the corner to give young white boys an outlet for all of their angst, whether that was the tortured mind of Jonathan Davis or the digitised fury of Trent Reznor. But even though Marilyn Manson seemed like that generation’s answer to Alice Cooper, his magnum opus is nowhere near the kind of faux intellectual study on god-like treatment of celebrities that people realise.

Because while there are some decent singles here and there from the record, the sad fact is that Manson was never that good of a songwriter. He does have some moments like ‘The Beautiful People’ that will forever be seared into people’s brains, but given all of the flash behind the album, that’s pretty much all it has most of the time, to the point where even the title track seems to be swallowed under its own self-congratulatory hubris.

And despite the concept being halfway decent about a way slowly turning into one of the most grotesque creatures that ever graced this planet, it gets a lot less enjoyable when you start looking through his rap sheet and realise all the heinous things that Manson did in his spare time behind the scenes. There were a lot of great moments of anger on a record like The Downward Spiral from the same time, but even though people can claim to separate the artist from the art, the amount of disgusting moments in Manson’s career has to make you wonder if he was really this monstrous the whole time.

<em>Latest Record Project Vol. 1 – </em>Van Morrison

There’s no real way to replace Van Morrison‘s classic rasp that he had back in his prime. Even though it was hard to even get a read on what he was saying half the time he sang, there was pure emotion behind every single note on Astral Weeks that no artist has really been able to capture before or since. But as the years go by, Morrison has gone from being one of the most entertaining artists with a mic in his hand to becoming the disgruntled old man that you would see shouting absolute nonsense in the middle of a subway station.

While there are some genuinely entertaining times when Morrison begrudgingly went into the studio back in the day, Latest Record Project is the sound of someone who is literally running on creative fumes. Oh, he does quote a bit of talking throughout every one of these tunes, but since one of the biggest songs that he had released during this period was his anti-vax song with Eric Clapton, the lyrical content doesn’t get much better here, including songs with such gripping titles as ‘Why Are You on Facebook?’

It’s a shame that Morrison has such harsh words for Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse, as most of his primal cries out to the world would be right at home next to trolls that like to use social media just to hate on anything and everything that they don’t like. It’s one thing to remember the kind of atmosphere that he created on Moondance, but the idea of that smooth voice suddenly growing into one of the most senile artists of all time is among one of the biggest falls from grace that the music world has ever seen.

<em>Dark Side of the Moon Redux – </em>Roger Waters

Classic albums often get that way because of how good they are at capturing a moment. Even though The Beatles didn’t intend to make anthems for a new generation when making Sgt Peppers, but in the paraphrased words of William Shakespeare, some albums have greatness thrust upon them because of what they represent in a specific space and time. And while Dark Side of the Moon is one of the few albums that seems to transcend both time and space, Roger Waters‘ reimagining of the record is one of the few times where a great album has become more difficult for fans to stomach after the fact.

It’s bad enough that Waters and David Gilmour have had their numerous public spats about who the true leader of the band was, but the idea of Waters trying to reframe his masterpiece for a modern audience misses the entire point. Part of what made Dark Side timeless is that it focused on the bare essentials of human life, and on this new version, hearing Waters spew his nonsensical ramblings in a Tom Waits-style voice just makes the whole thing sound like someone’s uncle trying to make a self-important comment about kids these days.

And since a lot of the album features new performances, it’s hard to even think of them as true reimaginings, especially with Richard Wright’s brilliant keyboard work being replaced with some of the most lifeless production that anyone has heard on any Floyd record, solo or otherwise. It’s easy for even the harshest critics to grade on a slight curve when looking at an album like this, but for an album that literally talks about being vibrant with colour, the only image this conjures up is that of a grey wall.

<em>Vulture </em>series – Ye

Do I really need to explain to you why Kanye West (Ye) is on here? Say what you will about how polarising his first records could be, but in an era when hip-hop was still all about the braggadocio, having a kid with nothing but a dream and a backpack full of beats on The College Dropout was at least novel at the time. But while some fans might have come and gone along the way and missed out on some true gems, there shouldn’t really be anyone trying to defend what Ye was doing when he decided to go full-on antisemite throughout the Vultures series.

While Ye has done everything he can as of late to distance himself from the kind of guy who was selling T-shirts with swastikas on them and talking about being a legitimate Nazi, not even the most clean-cut apology is going to erase this from his record. It was bad enough that Vultures 1 had a bunch of stans that were openly trying to defend some of the most hateful things he was saying, but when even the most hardcore defenders were telling the world that Vultures 2 was absolute trash, it seemed like every creative strength that Ye had to lean on throughout his career had finally been exhausted.

And as much as people might want to try to be in his corner and support him as he tries to build himself back up through one of the most psychotic downfalls any rap artist has ever taken, it’s hard to really blame anyone for not wanting to be around him all that often these days. It’s one thing to say you’re sorry, but in order to win back people’s trust, you need to walk the walk a little better than an explanation of your behaviour. Ye should have to atone for these albums for a long time, and even if you are still bumping tunes from Graduation, most of us would be doing him a favour if we don’t give either of these albums the time of day ever again.