10 hated albums that are actually masterpieces

Weezer (Red Album) – Weezer

The entire middle period of Weezer’s career in the 2000s usually elicits one major reaction: Huh? There had been many moments in the 1990s when things seemed to go a bit strange, but seeing the world’s greatest nerd-rock band suddenly find themselves making music centred around pop song formulas on Make Believe and Raditude made them look a bit too cynical for their own good. And while The Red Album usually joins that company, the shining moments are good enough to stand alongside the greatest tunes they ever created.

Whereas some fans might not be able to stomach the doofy lyrics in songs like ‘Troublemaker’, the rest of the album does have a few twists and turns that work out quite well. In one of the riskiest moves they could have made, Rivers Cuomo disappears halfway through the record, leaving the rest of the band to take one vocal each on the record, which actually goes over a lot better than expected on Brian Bell’s ‘Thought I Knew’ and Scott Shriner’s ‘Cold Dark World’.

And when they do swing for the fences on ‘The Angel and the One’ or ‘The Greatest Man That Ever Lived’, they pull it off magnificently, especially the latter with its ability to go from one genre to the next within the span of a few seconds and make it sound seamless. Every single one of Weezer’s albums has always had caveats next to them ever since 1996, but Red Album did show the band going in the right direction and making the best of their nerdiness as they inched closer and closer to dad rock.

Neighborhoods – Blink-182

The entire fallout of Blink-182 feels like looking at a strange high school drama in retrospect. Tom DeLonge may have needed to get his extraterrestrial music out of his system in Angels and Airwaves, but his decision to break the band up through an email rather than talking to them did end up stinging for a few years before Travis Barker’s tragic plane crash. Once they looked at the bigger picture, though, Neighborhoods was as good a comeback as they could have asked for.

Does that mean everything’s perfect? Absolutely not. If you listen to the effects on his guitar, DeLonge is still in Angels and Airwaves mode, but they work a lot better in the context of Blink. There was no way they could have kept on being the sophomoric skate punks forever, so hearing them grow up on tunes like ‘Ghost on the Dance Floor’ or write earnest love songs on ‘After Midnight’ balanced out their punk side a lot better when they transition into tunes like ‘Heart’s All Gone’.

DeLonge may have held up the band even more and ended up getting the boot again in the 2010s, but while Matt Skiba did a serviceable job replacing him and even well above anyone expected on California, there’s something special about the Neighborhoods era of the group. It may not have made a lot of sense at the time, but ever since the band reformed for One More Time, pieces of this record are hidden in the background of their stuff.

Mötley Crüe – Mötley Crüe

Making a transition between lead singers is never easy to pull off. Most people either throw in the towel or form an entirely new band once they lose their artistic face, but Mötley Crüe was never meant to be about one member. Tommy Lee and Nikki Sixx were on an equal footing with Vince Neil whenever they went out in public, so getting Neil out of the group should have been their excuse to make something a little more grizzly, right?

You’d think so, but once John Corabi was brought in, fans immediately dismissed their self-titled record as nothing but a cheap way for them to carry on without their frontman. Those naysayers would have had a point if the music wasn’t any good, but naming the album after themselves was a great way for them to introduce this new version of themselves to the world, with songs that ranged from ballads like ‘Misunderstood’ to some of their heaviest tunes like ‘Hooligan’s Holiday’.

It was admittedly going to take an adjustment period for people to accept Corabi singing songs like ‘Shout At the Devil’ and ‘Kickstart My Heart’, but had the label not been so cowardly about getting Neil back in the group, they may have not had to deal with his later faults, either. The band might be a band of brothers when they want to, but there’s no point in trying to make it work with Neil’s screechy voice when they have a grizzled badass.

Done With Mirrors – Aerosmith

Any chance of Aerosmith getting back together in the early 1980s felt like a pipe dream. The tension between Steven Tyler and Joe Perry had reached its breaking point, and as much as both their careers suffered, they needed to straighten themselves out a bit more before they could be in the same room with each other. And while the reunion tour had fans rubbing their eyes to make sure it was real, it’s still a mystery why those same fans never showed up for Done With Mirrors.

Since they were working out the bugs of their sound again, it was expected that things would be different, but you would have thought that fans had a secret vendetta against the album on principle. When looking back, though, the tunes were pretty decent, with Tyler revamping ‘Let the Music Do the Talking’ for Aerosmith fans and having some experimental moments like they did back in the day on tracks like ‘Darkness’ and ‘She’s On Fire’.

Some pieces might not have worked, but everyone would have gladly taken a few rough edges rather than having to bring in the professional songwriters behind the scenes. Permanent Vacation and Pump were still solid records even if the song doctors were brought in, but as evidenced by what happened on Just Push Play, the band traded in one problem for another all over an album that wasn’t even that bad to begin with.

Chaos and Disorder – Prince

Prince was never one to rest on his laurels throughout his career. There are many instances where you can hear bits and pieces of his sound turning up on his later records, but he was never someone who tried not to pivot out of fear of alienating his fan base. He wanted to try every single genre he could get his hands on, but it’s easier to hate on a project when the artist sees it as a huge downgrade.

Since ‘The Artist’ was locked in a never-ending battle with his record company over how many albums he needed to release, Chaos and Disorder was another attempt for him to tear through his contract as fast as possible. When making albums with no direction, though, that usually gives artists a chance to experiment, and this is one of the clearest examples of Prince channelling alternative rock during the 1990s, almost like he was trying to compete with the likes of Bush and Smashing Pumpkins.

It was far from the most imaginative idea that he ever had, but Prince is far from bad at this style of production. He was almost too talented to be involved with any one genre for too long, but there’s hardly any problem thinking about an alternate timeline when he had been born as the R&B descendant of Kurt Cobain.

One Hot Minute – Red Hot Chili Peppers

Whenever Red Hot Chili Peppers have a dip, it’s usually down to the lineup change that happens. They have never been known as the most stable band when it came to their guitarists, but despite losing Hillel Slovak, bringing in John Frusciante was a godsend that any band would have dreamt of. So when Frusciante left when he felt the band was getting too big, bringing in Dave Navarro of Jane’s Addiction was either met with indifference or a few cheap laughs when One Hot Minute came out.

But there needs to be some reappraisal for the band’s 1995 outing. For one thing, this is the heaviest record they ever made from a technical standpoint, with songs like ‘Warped’ and ‘Shallow Be Thy Game’ tackling some of the most ferocious riffs they ever made. After all, Navarro started as a heavier player, so it was only natural for him to start sprinkling in his influences like Tony Iommi into the mix.

The funk side of the band does end up getting thrown on the back burner a little too much, but given that everyone was relapsing on hard drugs as well, this is one of the most emotionally cathartic albums that they’ve ever worked on. They would eventually find some peace when working on Californication, but hearing them in this state is a perfect outing for anyone looking for an album full of music that hits as hard as ‘Around the World’.

Ghost Stories – Coldplay

Ever since the 2010s began, Coldplay seemed to completely shed their rock star skin. They still fit together as a decent pop act on the radio, but when looking at their records since Viva La Vida, there’s no reason to expect them to go back to the same kind of sounds that birthed albums like Parachutes. They had gone beyond their post-Britpop roots, but no one would have expected Chris Martin to make something as minimalist as Ghost Stories after his divorce from Gwyneth Paltrow.

While this isn’t a breakup album that will give Joni Mitchell’s Blue a run for its money, scaling things back and embracing electronics was a definite change of pace everyone needed. Since Mylo Xyloto was nothing but a fireworks display of sound, tunes like ‘Ink’ and ‘Magic’ take their time to unfold, and when they embrace the electronics fully on tracks like ‘Midnight’, the results are absolutely spellbinding.

It is undercut a little bit when listening to ‘A Sky Full of Stars’ throw everything for a loop at the tail end of the project, but that shouldn’t dissuade any Coldplay naysayers from giving this one a shot. There’s always been a debate about the one album in the band’s discography where everything went wrong, but Ghost Stories at least shows a point where they got their groove back in a completely different medium.

X – Def Leppard

There was never any way for hair metal bands to come back to life without looking a little desperate. Anyone can spend their lives trying to make party anthems until the day they die, but if that era was dead and gone by 1992, there was no chance bands like Poison were ever going to get the same treatment they had in their prime by 2002. The dream was officially over, but Def Leppard figured they would try their hand at making something a bit different from before.

While Euphoria put them back on everyone’s radar in the late 1990s, their attempt to blend into the pop sphere on X was bound to be risky. Although many hard rock fans either hated the album or refused to acknowledge its existence, there are many songs here where they manage to put their contemporaries to shame by doing pop rock incredibly well. Their signature harmonies hadn’t gone anywhere, so songs like ‘Long Way to Go’ and ‘Now’ actually have much more punch to them than they have any right to.

Then again, there was never a chance that this would have ever had the same kind of attention that Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake records were having at the time. It was simply too different for what they were doing, but anyone who got on board the bandwagon by listening to tracks like ‘Love Bites’ would have been in for a treat when they picked this record up.

A Thousand Suns – Linkin Park

If hair metal had been doomed as soon as grunge hit, nu-metal seemed to die a slow and ugly death when the 2000s rolled around. There was never any prominent subgenre available to take its place, but once Fred Durst started making hit singles based around wanting to sniff panties, it was clear that it had become disgusting and everyone had awoken from their musical coma. Although Linkin Park always held onto their credibility during the 2000s, it was bound to be questioned when A Thousand Suns came out.

While they always had a digital side to their sound, this was the first time they went full-on electronic music for an entire record. Many of the guitars are either buried or nowhere to be found, but by making a more artistic record, fans got to see what they were capable of when using the studio as an instrument, like the massive build-up in ‘Waiting For the End’ or the different noise blasts scattered throughout ‘Wretches and Kings’, all while wrapped together in a concept based around nuclear war.

Chester Bennington and Mike Shinoda may have talked a big game when the album hit store shelves, but they were right on the money when they called this their artistic statement in the same league as Pink Floyd and Radiohead. It’s not exactly on the same level as OK Computer, but over time, people will pick up the album and realise that there was a lot more in there than them slamming their heads against a MIDI synthesiser.

S&M – Metallica

For any major rock and roll band, live albums are normally considered also-rans in their catalogue. People can get hold of them if they want to, but there’s no reason to believe that a live version is going to miraculously change everyone’s opinion on a song if it sounds the same as the studio version with a crowd in the background. But Metallica always likes to mix it up, and when they got together with a symphony orchestra to transform their songs, S&M became incredibly reviled among the hardened metalheads.

If Load and Reload weren’t big enough signs that they left thrash behind, working with Michael Kamen to do muzak versions of their tunes should have been a disaster, but that’s not what happened. For the length of these concerts, Kamen acts as the fifth member of the band in many respects, always bringing a heightened sense of drama to songs that were already epic to begin with, like the sweeping intro to ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ or the strings matching the intensity of the military section of ‘One’.

And since ‘No Leaf Clover’ and ‘-Human’ were new material for the band, this was their moment to add symphonic metal to their list of subgenres, making them sound absolutely massive live. There may have been a few purists who were convinced that the old Metallica would never come back ever again, but allow me to extend an olive branch to that part of the fanbase. No, they’re not going to sound the same again, but it’s impossible to listen to the orchestra play the first few notes of ‘Master of Puppets’ and not feel something.