This list is compiled of bands who, having
released gold in the past, decided to let the fame get to their heads and are
guilty of brazenly spurting turgid, pearly globs of sternenrotzcontaining
defective DNA into the gaping mouths of you, the consumer. Maybe that’s a bit
extreme.
Not all of the following bands should be ashamed in themselves for the
following decisions/felonies I am about to reveal
however. Some of these examples while being baffling to most set the stage for
these bands to either follow up these efforts with a return to form, a complete
stylistic change or even a surge in sales. Or in the case of Guns N Roses years of extremely languid
and dragged out foreplay resulting in an end product of questionable quality.
Questionable quality that cost in the region of $13 million to make and produce
which makes the mind boggle.
#6 Kid A – Radiohead
Kid
A is simply one of the most confounding records to
ever be released, apart from a few releases from McGuff the dog. (I highly
recommend McGuff for his sheer WTF
factor that only just eclipses Kid A
that will make you trip balls so hard you’ll roll both ankles.) Released on the
back of the triumph that was OK Computer,
it is a violently radical departure from they’d previously done and was an
extremely bollocky move that can easily backfire and conflagrate into a coronal
farce (Like Risk from Megadeth). During the title track, you
can clearly see that Mr. Yorke
decided to experiment by relegating the importance of his voice and vocals, as
he sounds like he’s singing through the same vocoder they used on the old
school video game Bezerk.
The sessions that spawned this album like a
neonatal tadpole also produced follow up album Amnesiac which traipsed even further away from the successful
formula of Ok Computer and resulted
in a krautrock electronica hybrid in the vein of such antiquated and chaotic
bands such as Can and Neu, so I guess
George Santayana was right when he
said history repeats! Although unlike the direct paraphrasing of that quote,
this album can’t really be considered a mistake after the plaudits that was
excitedly slavered all over it by critics and fans alike and acted as the final
kick in the balls for Britpop that few bands survived. Unfortunately Coldplay was one of these bands.
#5 Faith No More – King For A Day, Fool For A Lifetime
This band always was a bit against the
grain, to say the least (but not even close to their oddball cousins in Mr Bungle, also fronted by Olympian
exemplar Mike Patton) and this album
is probably their strangest release of all. That is definitely saying something
when you listen to their album Angel Dust
which until this release was one of the quirkiest releases ever put out by
a major label and much like Kid A,
was an interesting choice to follow a commercial success. But also like Kid A, it was a bold charge in dangerous
territory not too dissimilar to the pyrrhic charge of the light brigade in Crimea.
Much like Mr. Bungle, this album contains many genre shifts in its well
stuffed orifices and these shifts can occur a few times during the course of
even one song. This change was brought about because both singer Mike Patton and interim guitarist Trey Spruance were from Mr. Bungle and brought their influences
along with them which resulted in this confluence. This was described by Spin Magazine as a ‘jackhammer sheathed
in a lubricated condom’. Ha. Haha.Hahaha.Apt.
People have viewed this album as a letdown,
but I think it’s cool. It’s not exactly easy to ambitiously shoehorn so many
genres into a tightly fitting corset like this and everything sounds like it
fits well like a puzzle (just) instead of shittily stitched together
Frankenstein with its entrails hanging out like tagliatelle, like bands have
done in the past like when Kiss gave
disco a go.
#4 Guns N Roses – The Spaghetti Incident
This album didn’t get as much scorn as I
think it deserved, it was a bit of a kicked in shit tin to say the least. It
was but a cover album released after the bands Use Your Illusion tour which spanned 27 countries and went for over
two years, so you could probably excuse them for being burnt out. But I’m not
going to. Soon after it was released, the band slowly withered into a piece of
atrophied beef jerky leading to Dr. Pepper coming up with their bold bet to
give every American a free can of their product if Guns ever released another
album. Unluckily for them, there was a new album farted out in 2008 called
Chinese Democracy.
Cover albums really get my goat for the
most part. I can tolerate some, but that’s because they’re usually packaged as
EP’s, or just a compilation of various covers and B sides that have been intermittently
played or released over a particular band’s career. (see also: Garage Inc. and Hidden Treasures) Tribute albums such as Maiden Heaven may be a little schmaltzy and cheesy for some people,
but I don’t mind them too much as long as the original song isn’t butchered
into a fine, bloody marinara like mix or dumbed down . (Punk goes Metal. There
aren’t enough swear words in the world to express my frothing distaste for
releases such as that. Buggerfuckshitcuntdick NO! It’s like being bukkake’d by
kitsch. But whatever floats your boat and all that.)
#3 Niandra Lades and Usually Just A T-Shirt - John Frusciante
One of the more
baffling self-inflicted gunshots to the head of fame and fortune. Frusciante’s
peculiar behaviour and eventual jettisoning from the Red Hot Chili Peppers left
him in a bad place once he spent all his money on drugs and new possessions
after his house perished in a sizzling conflagration. It is widely believed
that the fame got to him and he really didn't enjoy the superstar status of the
band that had hit cosmic levels very quickly after his entry into the band.
This and various acts of intolerable impertinence that drew the ire of vocalist
Anthony Kiedis lead to this departure mid tour. (You can see his act of supreme
idiocy on YouTube, The most notable of which being his odd improvisation during
the beginning of Under The Bridge on Saturday Night Live. Red faces all round
in front of all of America.
Niandra Lades
can’t really be considered bland garbage, just the work of a madman who was a
fruit loop at the time despite his already profound eccentricity (you can see
the extent of his ongoing game of silly buggers in various interviews conducted
during the nineties in his junkie sanctum which shows him looking more like an
emaciated wraith than anything), although it’s not all concrete insanity as the
first side was recorded before he had quit the Chili’s and actually has names
attached to the tracks as opposed to Untitled #1 through #13 (of which #7 makes
me feel like sitting on an isolated beach somewhere and just fall asleep)
It’s actually a
credit to the man that he could slip straight back into RHCP to record
Californication so seamlessly. He did this despite the fact he had destroyed/pawned
all his guitars and hadn't played in quite awhile before the recording of the
album.
#2 St. Anger – Metallica
The documentary Some Kind Of Monster which
chronicled the band’s struggles with personal demons and portrayed them as a
kindergarten of toddlers with toxic personalities who like to slam doors and
had to be sent to rehab.
The aftermath showed
a scene that seemed like the band was surrounding by sycophantic nodding
donkeys who basically let them do anything without stopping to tell them what
they were doing was constructing a Neolithic henge of rock solid stupidity. Or
they were too scared. In reality I could include several ‘tallica albums in
this list, including a collaboration with Lou Reed that was ill advised to say
the least. It’s a bit upsetting in the way they completely lost their ‘nana but
it’s one of the plights of increasing age you could say like dementia and adult
diapers.
It definitely reeks of a band that has cracks
all along its fuselage that have been covered up with band-aids with various
Disney characters adorning them and this hasn’t stopped the whole thing coming
apart in mid-air scattering wreckage all over the surrounding countryside. It
probably should have been pushed back a couple more years than it already was
when you release the amount of turmoil the band was going through in the time
and the whole thing just feels too hurried.
St. Anger has potential though, it is just
that this promise has been severely corroded by such things including but not
limited to the interesting choice of using trash cans as drums and the whole
thing sounds like a bunch of woks and skillets in a washing machine, (not
really but you can’t tell the difference in the mix) doltish lyrics (Oh dear), and the bizarre omission of any
kind of guitar calisthenically pleasing solos from axeman Kirk Hammett which
basically relegates his role even lower than it was previous to this. A recent
performance of the title track this year showed how it should’ve sounded when
it was recorded and actually received a positive reception, something not
usually associated with this album. The riffs weren’t actually complete crap,
just that the arrangement and overall sound is a complete toy-box in a tornado
mess which has unfortunately let them down greatly. Half a star.
#1 Lou Reed – Metal Machine Music
First of all, technically this isn't a Lou Reed album, but rather one
of the only albums played by a mischievous poltergeist. If that explanation
turns out to be complete bunkum then this means the guitars were playing
themselves as Reed just set the guitars up against the amplifiers and let them
drone for just over an hour as the feedback vibrated the strings and this cycle
continued forevermore until you fustigated the living shit out of your player. Literally.
The vinyl form had a locked groove built into it which leave the record looping
forever (which would have been the medium de jour for playing music of the day
when it was released back in 1975)I can safely say that this gave me prions the
one time I listened to it all the way through. It’s that bad. Aural
horsewhipping. It’s one of those things that you or I could do, but due to a
lack of prestige and a famous name we’d probably be derided as dumb dumbs.
This however didn’t lead to Mr. Reed
panhandling for cash to buy syringes and eventually die of an easily treatable
infection in a box somewhere in Skid Row, but rather paved the way for him to continue
to dabble in the thaumaturgical sorcery that is the avant-garde and experimental
and he immediately returned to form a matter of months later with the release
of Coney Island Baby which is a relief because it’d be fair to assume Metal
Machine Music was a result of his burgeoning insanity. Thankfully not.