ITT: Terrible albums by good artists
All of them to bee hojest
>>64263558
>>64263547
You can't bump your own thread, OP.
>>64264036
Check the thread stats my man
>>64264075
There's two IPs here. Mine and yours (as in you, the OP).
>>64264089
The OP doesn't show up on the count friendo
Bowie - Never Let Me Down
Essentially all Bob Dylan from the late 70s through the early 90s is awful.
>>64263547
>open CCR thread
>it ain't me starts playing
>>64264524
Blood on the Tracks is pretty good imo. Everything else from that era is shit though.
>>64265113
Desire is good too you mong.
>>64263547
>democratizes songwriting once
>>64265113
BOTT is from 1975. I meant everything from about 77 onward.
>>64263547
Is she holding a potatoe?
>>64265195
underrated
>>64263547
Even the cover looks terrible
>>64265141
>"""""""""""""the velvet underground"""""""""""""
After Desire and Blood, Dylan seemed to be completely out of ideas and even worse, his style of music was losing popularity in the disco/New Wave era. Many of his 80s albums fail because they see him bandwagoning fads that he had no real interest in although at least they have good production to make up for the anemic songwriting.
The worst though? His born-again Christian phase which led to him putting out two gospel records. The first one (Slow Train) still manages to be pretty good and retain the classic Dylan sound, so that even the less religious people among us can appreciate the groove and solid songwriting on there.
Saved however was a total bomb. Here Bob completely loses it and records an album that sounds like a televangelist rally. His entire schtick has always revolved around subtle, metaphorical lyrics that leave you wondering just what he's on about. Saved has all the subtly of a sledgehammer and even worse, the songs are totally uninteresting.
Elton John's ill-timed disco record released when disco was fading out. All of it sucks, but the most horrible thing on here is an 8 minute disco rendition of Johnny B. Goode that seems to go on forever. He's had bad albums since, but this seems to be the one record that his fans truly never forgave him for.
Neil Young laid a bunch of eggs in the 80s.
>>64265731
Didn't Geffen sue him for making unsellable records?
Three words - Metal Machine Music
Towards the end of his career, Frank Sinatra made some...strange choices a lot of which involved covering modern pop songs that didn't exactly fit his style. His Neil Diamond, Bread, and John Denver covers are hardly bad of course, but they're somehow missing something. In 1979, the Chairman of the Board released his first all-new studio album in six years and with a gap that long, he decided to go all-out with a three-disc epic titled Past, Present, and Future.
The "Past" record is entirely Tin Pan Alley standards, a medium Sinatra was completely comfortable in and at the age of 64, he still covers all these songs (including remakes of stuff he'd done previously) like a champ. No complaints here.
The "Present" record is recent pop hits and it's here that he kind of loses it. His cover of Paul McCartney's Something isn't bad, but the attempts at Billy Joel and Neil Diamond just don't work when forced into a big band sound.
The "Future" record is where the wheels really start to come off. This part is basically a concept space opera where Sinatra takes us on a tour of the solar system and sings about his impressions of the planets. One gets the impression that his chief songwriter and arranger Gordon Jenkins was trying his darndest to imitate Styx or Rush, but completely misses the point. Given Frank's listless, slightly befuddled delivery on this material, you can also tell that he wasn't into it either and honestly had no clue what he was doing. For the first time in his career, Old Blue Eyes gave up creative control and let Gordon Jenkins guide him along, to facepalm-worthy results.
Luckily for all concerned, Sinatra's next album, 1981's She Shot Me Down, is all oldskool torch songs which he delivers excellently. Go listen to that instead.
>>64265955
Found the pleb
>>64265955
Even Lou himself was at a loss to explain that record.
The 80s was pretty hard on a lot of artists, especially those of the 60s generation. The conservative revival of the Reagan years and the slicked-back, high-tech musical sounds made many ornaments of hippiedom seem like a dinosaur.
Few fared worse than George Harrison.
After a few so-so albums (including Somewhere In England which rode to success off a tribute to the slain John Lennon), Harrison decided to update his sound even more in 1982. The actual songwriting is mostly crud that the sleek, synth-loaded 80s production tries to cover up. This shouldn't be too surprising given Harrison's preoccupation at the time with auto racing and movies.
The album opens with a single that failed to chart at all, followed by a puke-tastic cover of the doo-wop song I Really Love You. And the title track...well, you'd have to hear it to believe it. It's that bad.
Needless to say, it was rushed because Harrison, much like Gene Simmons during this same period, had found interests outside of his recording career and it showed. He took a hiatus from the studio for the next five years before coming back with the much stronger Cloud Nine.
>>64266683
Is it worse than Extra Texture ?
>>64267101
That it is.
Synthesizers everywhere and anemic, unmemorable songs, this is easily the worst Who record. They could do no wrong through the 60s and 70s, even the mid to late decade material when punk threatened to send them to oblivion.
As the 80s began, Keith Moon was dead and the unremarkable Kenney Jones took his place at the skins. Face Dances had a group of decent songs including You Better, You Bet that might have been ok if another band had performed them. It's Hard, not so much. Aside from Jones's boring as shit drumming, Roger Daltrey's delivery sounds increasingly forced as if he was either getting tired of singing Pete Townshend's songs or thought he was getting too old for this kind of material or both. John Entwistle just seems bored. Kenney Jones one can tell is just there to collect a paycheck.
During this period, Pete was definitely bored of The Who and more preoccupied with his solo career, so the band was now more a cash cow for him than anything. For proof of this, listen to Empty Glass, a much better record than Face Dances or It's Hard.
One might surmise that the band members never really liked each other on a personal level and their relationship was more professional than anything else and that Keith Moon was the thin glue holding them together, so without him, it all came apart.
>>64265183
>he's never heard infidels
top lmao
>>64263547
I've never heard this before. Is it that bad?
If it has Eric Clapton's name on it, it's gotta be good, right? I mean, this was Eric Freaking Clapton, guitar legend and the man who gave us Cream, Blind Faith, and Derek and the Dominoes.
Well, he had a mountain to climb down in the 80s-90s. He kept releasing good albums, but the best ones didn't rely on original material anymore. 1989's Journeyman had two songs he merely co-wrote while the other good records were blues covers and Unplugged. The reason for this is a tragic one, the death of his son Connor who fell out of a window. Needless to say, Clapton was so devastated that for years he could write nothing except the beautiful, moving Tears From Heaven.
Emotional turmoil usually makes for fantastic musical output, like for instance Layla And Other Assorted Love Songs. At this point however, Eric was more interested in telling us where he was in life, which was nowhere. The lyrics on Pilgrim are genuinely touching and one can imagine him in tears as he wrote them, but unfortunately the super-soft, poppy production fails to match the heavy songwriting. The man who brought us Cream had become a pop snoozefest. There's nothing on Pilgrim but generic synth pop and a few guitar hooks so basic that a 15 year old could have played them.
I mean, really. It's hard not to feel bad for the guy. Nobody on earth would ever want to lose a child in the way he did, but the anemic production on Pilgrim completely fails to sell us on his pain. Into the trash it goes.
THRAK
>>64265183
Street legal is a jam
>>64268035
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gbr33Kns6xU
Have at it.
>>64268368
this hurts
David Crosby, Stephen Still, and Graham Nash were at one time the best supergroup around. Their albums basically encapsulated the entire 1960s experience on a plastic platter. The first two of them (the second featuring Neil Young) are some of the decade's highlights and have held up excellently.
The first one (CSN only) is all about the hippie movement, its goals, beliefs, and dreams. The second was darker. The 60s were over now. David Crosby was becoming increasingly paranoid and addicted to substances. Stills was getting more depressed, Nash was still hoping for the peace and love the flower children had dreamed of, and Young shows up just to throw his 2ยข in. Everybody I Love You, the album closer, is an uptempo, yet slightly pleading tune begging on the hippies to keep the dream alive. None of their later records ever approached those two and vary considerably in quality, but for better or worse are all about the 60s generation and what they were doing at the moment.
Then there was 1990's Live It Up. The band had largely coasted through the Reagan years on autopilot with bits and pieces of solo songs, mostly because DC was in and out of rehab. By 1990, they seemed primed for a big comeback. Unfortunately they hired professional song doctors who gave them a bunch of listless material they didn't care about and even the songs they did write themselves are pure dreck. The overly glossy production with lots of bad 80s synthesizers and reverb doesn't help.
Haven't We Lost Enough has potential, it's the least produced track on the album and has little more than Graham's voice and guitar, but somehow it's not stripped enough. The rest of the track sounds like a Michael Bolton album.
The worst of all? The cover art. What the fuck is with the hot dogs? Needless to say, CSN never recovered from Live It Up. They've continued touring and releasing new records since then, but nobody cares.
>>64268164
I demand explanation
>>64268206
"What is Beat? What is TCoL?"
THRAK was an oasis in that dark two decades of Crimson
>>64268368
This album depresses me. As a die hard DEVO fan, this album genuinely hurts to listen to.
Once upon a time, Rod Stewart was one of the best rock vocalists alive. Just listen to his stuff with Faces or The Jeff Beck Group. Even better than that, his first four solo albums. Every Picture Tells A Story showed that a rock record done with acoustic guitars and mandolins (!) is just crazy enough to work. Even had the slower, more poignant Mandolin Wind and absolutely god-level Tim Hardin and Bob Dylan covers.
Smiler was a little bit of a dip in quality, but Rod rebounded with another two phenomenal records in Atlantic Crossing and A Night On The Town. Then the inevitable happened - he increasingly lapsed into overcooked, self-indulgent dreck on Foot Loose and Fancy Free, including an epic 7-1/2 minute cover of The Supremes' You Keep Me Hanging On. Still, it wasn't all bad.
Then Rod went full-out disco and became a terribly cheesy Top 40 hit factory. Do You Think I'm Sexy was pure crud (even Rod himself hates that song) but it could and did get worse.
Stewart entered the 80s with Foolish Behavior, an otherwise worthless album that served as little more than a wrapper for the hit single Passion. The followup album Tonight I'm Yours was decent, then came a live album and probably the biggest abomination of his career, Body Wishes.
>>64269530
The cover is of course a deliberate imitation of the Elvis Greatest Hits compilation "50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can't Be All Wrong". Two tracks, Baby Jane and What Am I Gonna Do (I'm So In Love With You) are passable and significantly the only songs from Body Wishes that appeared on a Stewart Greatest Hits collection, although one of them had to be four CDs long to fit it. They're typical 80s synthpop and have a decent, danceable rhythm and ok lyrics.
That leaves us with the rest of BW. The title track was Do You Think I'm Sexy Mark III (Passion was DYTIS Mark II). Sweet Surrender was a country ballad, Strangers Again an awful ballad, and Something Awful an even more painful mix of Spanish guitar and synthesizers. And then, Ghetto Blaster. Yes, I'm not making this up, Rod Stewart actually did a song called Ghetto Blaster complete with BUM BOOM BUM bass.
Needless to say, Rod was a long time in recovering from this debacle. For the remainder of the 80s, he continued producing good singles, but not albums and he didn't get back on track until 1991's Vagabond Heart. Three decent 90s albums were nullified by 2001's Human, an album that has little use other than as a drink coaster. After that, he decided to churn out Great American Songbook records like sausages. Nobody cares, but it hasn't stopped him from doing them anyway.
Perhaps Rod could team up with Rick Rubin and become Johnny Cash 2.0. There's still time.
Those GASB records (Bob Dylan did one too) are slightly amusing as if the rock generation suddenly started digging through their parents' attic and found a box of Perry Como records and thought "Hmmmm..."
>>64270651
Rod Stewart by the early 2000s was in a bit of a quandry methinks; his 50-something self wasn't going to make 12 year old girls wet their panties and trying to cover Linkin Park, Eminem, or Justin Timberlake wasn't really going to work either.
So w/e. He somewhat cynically decided to release 45 albums worth of the Gershwin/Porter/Berlin canon that he would have run away from screaming when he was 21. They're hardly bad of course, but come off as slightly calculated and artists of his generation have somehow never produced interpretations of those songs that matched the finely-tuned perfection of Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, and Louis Armstrong.
>>64265573
Elton's laid quite a few stinkers like this album, Blue Moves, Leather Jackets (absolute rock bottom for him), 21 At 33, and Breaking Hearts.
>>64271418
>>64265573
Honestly, VOL isn't _that_ terrible. Most of the tracks are just forgettable, the only true atrocity on there being JBG (kill it with fire).
Victim of Love and Leather Jackets are truly Elton's worst albums. Nothing else even comes close. Stuff like Duets is just boringly inoffensive. But those albums...oh good god no.
It's significant that Leather Jackets is the only Elton John album to have not been digitally remastered or reissued after the original printing.
It seems to me that the worst EJ albums are the ones that came about as a result of a contractual obligation, eg. VOL and Duets.
Well, it seems to be almost universally agreed that Victim and Jackets are his worst albums. I'd say the former isn't as bad because he didn't write any of the songs on there himself, while he most certainly did write some truly dire stuff on the latter, including that collab with Cher *shudders*.
