Falling From Grace: 10 comeback albums that failed miserably
The great musical comeback is one of the hardest feats for anyone to pull off. It’s bad enough having to kick down the door the first time, but after falling from grace, it’s almost impossible for someone to try to win over the general public all over again and somehow manage to earn their stripes alongside the other flavours of the day. While many career resurrections have come after the fact, acts like Pink Floyd didn’t have a prayer once they came out with these albums.
Then again, timing is already working against some of these once-rock giants. They certainly had the ability to make incredible music if they wanted to, but their brand of rock and roll tended to be from a bygone era and had nothing to do with what the people on the streets were listening to at the time.
Even if they were in vogue, many of these songs wouldn’t have had a prayer on the charts. Compared to the artists who chose to put their best foot forward, it was clear that these reunions were bound to sink like a stone, either because they tried to rehash too much of their past or went the complete opposite direction and wound up trying to sound hip with the kids and looked completely out of touch.
Whether they played it safe or went into dangerous territory, it wasn’t worth it for any of these artists, mostly being laughed out of the room by everyone who actually cared enough to listen to them anymore. They may have created the greatest music of their generation, but it didn’t take long for most to see how far the mighty had fallen.
10 failed musical comebacks:
10. Other Voices – The Doors
The Doors’ existence was already a strange miracle. While every member approached rock and roll from a completely different angle, their interpretation of rock and roll through Jim Morrison’s warped view of reality helped everyone see the darker side of what the hippie idealists had to offer. So when you take the most important frontman of all time and decide to carry on without him, was anyone really shocked when it didn’t work?
Then again, I don’t really want to call Other Voices a terrible album. In fact, the remaining Doors actually sound pretty damn good on the musical front, and there are more than a few decent licks scattered throughout the project, like on the song ‘Tightrope Ride’. There’s just one problem: this is not The Doors, and it never will be.
Though the allure of Morrison was still present on an album like An American Prayer, which they released later, this feels like the result of everyone just hoping for the best when they all cut loose in the studio, only for Ray Manzarak’s deep baritone to fall criminally short of Morrison’s performance. Still a decent album, but if they wanted to do right by their fans, it probably should have been called something else.
9. Born Again – Black Sabbath
After storming into the 1980s, Black Sabbath seemed like they were impervious to failure. They didn’t have the kind of songs that any mother would want their kids listening to, but the fact that they were able to transition from one iconic vocalist in Ozzy Osbourne to another in Ronnie James Dio feels impossible. Once Dio found himself out of Sabbath for even a shorter time than Osbourne, the metal pioneers figured they would throw something together with the next rock icon they could find.
Since Ian Gillan was out of Deep Purple around the same time Sabbath were cratering, Born Again was at least a decent premise. Hell, even Osbourne would have probably considered someone like Gillan an influence back in his early days, so how come the end result sounds like something that was recorded in a trash can?
It’s not even that all the songs are bad, but the fact that you’re hearing them from what sounds like the bottom of a well is absolutely inexcusable for veterans of this calibre, with bassist Geezer Butler later complaining that the sound of the record was far from what it should have been. Then again, when you hear what actually transpired on songs like ‘Digital Bitch’, maybe it’s for the best that you can’t hear everything going on.
8. Crown Royal – Run-DMC
All fans of hip-hop the world over probably have offered to buy the members of Run-DMC lunch at least once. Even if you don’t like anything past the G-funk 1990s or are an exclusively 2000s-style hip-hop head, no one is doing anything that Darryl McDaniels and Joseph Simmons hadn’t done first. And with the emergence of rap rock becoming the biggest thing in music, the return of Run-DMC on Crown Royal should have absolutely killed if it had the right people.
For a rap group that was all about combining rap and rock, though, the people they got to fill out the bracket on this album feel like the result of someone playing a cruel joke on them. Regardless of how you feel about them today, the thought of having Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit and Kid Rock on the record made for one of the single weirdest collaborations in rock history, sounding almost like they were leaning into their corniness.
It’s not like the record was embraced by the band, either, with McDaniels wiping his hands of the project later and refusing to even contribute a full verse to any of the songs. Considering one of the core trio wasn’t even there, what we have here is just a husk of a Run-DMC. Their name might be on the cover, but make no mistake, this is a mixtape of the rap rock styles of 2001 with the name ‘Run-DMC’ thrown on top of it.
7. Just Push Play – Aerosmith
As Run-DMC was struggling to get a foothold in the early 2000s, their rock contemporaries Aerosmith were no different. Both groups made beautiful music together in the 1980s, and even when they went their separate ways in the 1990s, Aerosmith could still turn in excellent songs when they wanted to. Except they didn’t want to this time. They wanted that Armageddon-style hit all over again.
When approaching the next album, Just Push Play, Aerosmith substituted all that dirty blues sound they were known for in favour of the sonic pop sheen you would see out of the teenybopper genre. Since they had just done the Super Bowl with NSYNC, there are way too many similarities between this album and No Strings Attached than there ever should be, including those sunshine vocal harmonies that sound like blues gutter rats trying to be The Beach Boys.
Aerosmith was already leaning into their pop sound ever since the 1990s, but when a song like ‘Jaded’ got into the charts and stayed there for a while, it wasn’t really a success. This was a disaster for one of the greatest American rock outfits in the world, and they would be spending the rest of their days trying to pick themselves back up.
6. The Weirdness – The Stooges
Nothing The Stooges ever made was meant to be easy-listening music. Even if you’ve been ingrained in the punk tradition, albums like Raw Power and Fun House can leave you with a few scars if you’re not careful enough. So when Iggy Pop decided to get the old misfits back together for The Weirdness, we weren’t conditioned to expect anything. Then again, something listenable would have been nice.
When you look at the rap sheet here, it seems like they had everything to make a classic record. Getting Mike Watt to fill in on bass could have been great, and yet a lot of the album feels like the production crew turned every knob on the board and figured that they would just work with that. And if it’s not already clear, Pop’s voice had gone from the punk spirit to something that could scare you half to death.
He may have been going for that kind of maniacal delivery on most of the songs, but a lot of his unique social commentary and raucous attitude were replaced by incoherent ramblings that sound like a homeless man shouting obscenities at you on the street. That kind of intensity is usually perfect for a genre like punk, but if it’s not executed properly, you get the kind of music that sounds like a concerned parent’s idea of what a punk album should sound like.
5. Time – Fleetwood Mac
When talking about career comebacks, you have to really narrow down which one when it comes to Fleetwood Mac. You can call their decision to soldier on without Peter Green as their true comeback, but more often than not, people’s memories of them exploding came from their next renaissance with Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham. And while that lineup is still considered the classic one for a reason, things took a sharp turn the minute they hit the 1990s.
Even when ‘The Mac’ lost a core part of themselves with Buckingham’s departure after Tango in the Night, there was still a fair share of highlights on the next album, Behind the Mask. Now with Nicks gone, Time is the kind of album that feels like it was made to be forgotten, with lacklustre tunes galore and Christine McVie sounding like she would rather be anywhere else other than in the studio.
And despite someone like Bekka Bramlett having the unenviable task of having to fill Nicks’s shoes in the group, her songwriting skills and stage presence are nowhere near the kind of rock and roll spirit that Nicks delivered. But can you really hold it against them? This was just Fleetwood Mac going through the motions to get an album out, and for anyone who says their generation was nothing but dad rock, this is not helping that case.
4. American Dream – Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young
Neil Young isn’t one to fall back on nostalgia. He works for no one else but the muse in his head, and if that means leaving a good thing behind, it doesn’t matter if he’s making millions of dollars if he would rather be better satisfied somewhere else. Young made a promise to David Crosby that he would get sober, and when the former Byrds musician delivered, Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young were in full flight again with an album that no one wanted to make.
The idea of getting ageing rock stars together may have been lucrative in the late 1980s, but those bands at least sounded like they were having fun again. Hearing Young sing about the American dream being a lie on the title track sounds completely wrong, as if he was trying to write something that could pass for an American history lesson for 12th graders.
While Young was the one holding everybody up, everyone else seemed to be spending their time turning in shit, with Stills making some all-time clunkers on ‘That Girl’ and Crosby barely holding himself together as he tried to recover from years of abuse on songs like ‘Compass’. It’s easy to appreciate the sentiment of an album like this, but even if Crosby was able to beat his demons, American Dream is the sound of a group exhausted rather than reinvigorated.
3. Dirty Work – The Rolling Stones
By the 1980s, The Rolling Stones didn’t really need to make any more albums for as long as they lived. They had been the longest-running rock and roll band of all time, and half of the reason why people went to their shows anymore was to relive the past and hear their immortal anthems from the beginning of their careers. No group can exist without changing with the times, and Mick Jagger suddenly got the idea of making The Stones into a neon-flavoured rock and roll outfit.
There are some decent cuts on Dirty Work like ‘One Hit to the Body’, but most of the album feels like something that should have been thrown out of David Bowie’s mainstream albums around the same time. In fact, half of the songs don’t even feel like Jagger and Keith Richards wrote them; instead, they feel like an AI version of them that spits out what a Rolling Stones song should be.
Even Ronnie Wood admitted that his involvement in the album said it all for the project, remarking that the reason why it was so bad was because he had way too many credits on the album than anything else. At least Wood is trying to place blame. He was just trying to help the mission along, but when you have an idea this flimsy to start out with, you’re only going to get diminishing returns.
2. The Endless River – Pink Floyd
Half of Pink Floyd’s greatest material has been indebted to those who have come before them. Although they could have remained an artsy psychedelic rock act for the rest of their days, the dissolution of Syd Barrett led them to dream of something even bigger, almost like they were trying to become the rockstars that Barett never got the chance to be. Wish You Were Here may be the purest distillation of that kind of tribute, but Richard Wright’s send-off was far more boring than anything else.
In theory, something like this should work, but David Gilmour admitted before the record came out that this wasn’t the Pink Floyd we once knew. Gilmour saw this more as a celebration of Wright’s work, and in some ways, it works. However, when looked at alongside the other Pink Floyd albums, The Endless River could substitute for an anaesthetic for how morose it sounds on every single track.
Pink Floyd had never been afraid of making instrumentals, but half of the songs sound like they are building up to something and ultimately go nowhere, as if you’re listening to a new age CD instead of something by one of the greatest rock bands of all time. This isn’t to discount the tribute to Wright at all. It’s nice for him to be remembered as one of the founders of Floyd, but when dissecting the performances, his tribute is the kind of boring background music that sounds like it should be playing over the loudspeakers at some transcendental meditation clinic.
1. Generation Swine – Mötley Crüe
Most of the greatest hair metal artists of the 1980s didn’t really have any business surviving past 1992. Some people from the era managed it okay, but in 1995, was anyone really listening intently to what the next masterpiece from Poison was going to be? Nikki Sixx actually managed to steer Mötley Crüe in a decent direction with their self-titled album, but their decision to rehire Vince Neil for Generation Swine saw them take every strange experiment in the wrong direction.
It’s not like it’s hard to get Mötley Crüe’s aesthetic down, either. They were all about sleazy rock and roll, but their desire to become the next version of U2, Nine Inch Nails, and Pantera all in one go is one of the most unintentionally hilarious fumbles in rock history, especially when they try to put some gruffness into their sound on songs like ‘Afraid’ and ‘Flush’.
There are actually a few songs on here that could have been something decent if old singer John Corabi had been singing them, but hearing Neil’s voice alongside every other wrong move just feels like one big musical pigsty. If that’s what they were going for with the title, then bravo, but something tells me that this version of the Crüe at least wanted to make something that wasn’t just a joke.
