Entertainment For Lively Minds
The Worst Album You Have Ever Heard...
I do seem to have a slightly sado-masochistic streak when it comes to music. Please help me feed my desire for uncovering utter tripe by nominating your least favourite album (one you have actually heard please)
I’m going for Duran Duran’s shocking 1990 “release”, Liberty. At the time of it’s release all I was aware of was that a single, The Violence Of Summer, had tanked in pretty spectacular fashion. Subsequently, however, my fondness for early Duran has lead me to investigate some of their later works. So I came to Liberty with a fairly open mind. It really is the most shocking thing you will have ever heard. It’s first crime is that it aims to be cool – I think there was some attempt at trying to make something slightly in step with the house music that was big in the charts at the time. However, the resulting album, for the most part, sounds like the New Kids on the Block covering The J Geils Band..
As for the lyrics (and this is some achievement) they are by far the worst that Le Bon has ever howled along to. Much of the album is like the aural equivalent of a Pirelli-calendar, riddled with the kind of dated sex obsessed lyrics that were de rigour in 1990 (“look at me I have sex and I’m not afraid to sing about it in a vaguely covert fashion” – see also George Michael, Madonna and erm.. Colour Me Badd!!). You can almost hear the cocaine flying up their collective passages. Stomach this couplet if you dare:
“Divine blasphemer tempting holding beads of jism, with a scarlet chatachisim.” (from “Venice is Drowning “)
- More from walker182.
- Login or register to post comments
-
Hats
The Blue Nile.
Not a popular opinion around these parts but I struggled more with this than any other album I care to remember.
I had been meaning to get around to it for over ten years as it always appeared in Best Albums Ever lists and was touted by artists I like but when I finally did I could not believe what I was listening to.
Perhaps it was the build up, I don't know, but I hated every moment of it.
I blow really hot and cold on this.
Sometimes it's just what I want to listen to. If I put it on when I'm not in the mood for it, though, I can't bear it: the production often strikes me as horribly cheesy, and the songs as uninspired. I don't know another record that can produce such opposite extremes of reaction in me.
As a general rule, it's a headphones album for me. Walking back home on a freezing, pitch-black night from the train station is pretty much the ideal situation for listening to "Hats": it's immersive and beautiful in that context.
I can't listen to it casually, and when I tried to put it on a few nights ago in a snug, bright living room, it sounded shite. Not just bland or average, but almost willfully awful.
Very strange record. Or possibly very strange Bob.
Spot on
Hats is a very atmospheric album..suits certain moods, places etc, although I have never thought of it as being "cheesy"...In fact with it's very 80's sound, it still sounds, rather strangely to these cloth ears, timeless.
I'm with you
...this goes for the Blue Nile in general, not just Hats. Very occasionally if a song catches me in the right mood I love it; if not I either think 'I can see what people are getting at but it's not for me', or 'this is absolutely bloody awful and I don't see how anyone can like it'. I can't think of any other music that provokes such wildly differing reactions from me.
Having said all that - the perfect Blue Nile experience for me was listening to Let's Go Out Tonight on headphones while wandering around the National Gallery. It should be deeply wrong - but somehow, the yearning vocal, coupled with the gloomy, ghostly backing, seem to combine perfectly with looking at centuries-old pictures of long dead people staring out at you with accusing looks.
How odd..
I agree with you completely, Bob, but, for me, I can only listen to the album, on headphones, at night, when it's really, really hot and sticky.
Well, better than smoking
I suppose...
Definitely
In my top 10 favourite albums of all time.
Hats
Right that's it, this place is full of Philistines. I'm off.
Eurrghh - Venice is Drowning?
In what?
They don't mention
that in the tourist brochures...
Don't Look Now
suddenly possesses even more layers of meaning...
evil beat
Evil Heat - Primal Scream
Don't get me wrong, i loved Xtrmntr and as a follow up i expected good things. I actualy can't quite put my finger on why because a lot of the musical stylings are the same as Xtrmntr......but my god it's a dud.
evil beat
Evil Heat - Primal Scream
Don't get me wrong, i loved Xtrmntr and as a follow up i expected good things. I actualy can't quite put my finger on why because a lot of the musical stylings are the same as Xtrmntr......but my god it's a dud.
evil beat
Evil Heat - Primal Scream
Don't get me wrong, i loved Xtrmntr and as a follow up i expected good things. I actualy can't quite put my finger on why because a lot of the musical stylings are the same as Xtrmntr......but my god it's a dud.
I listened to some of that this morning…
I listened to some of that this morning…
And like you I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why it wasn’t up to the standards of XTRMNTR… but my god does it fall short of the mark.
Even the tracks that should be good (the spaced out psychadelia of “Deep Hit..” and the Kraftwerk pastiche of “Autobahn 66”) are woefully lacking any kind of impact. Perhaps there were some leftovers from the XTRMNTR sessions?
I stopped buying Scream
just before Evil Heat came out. Just had a listen. I really like the Martin Duffy track Space Blues #2. Maybe it's the lack of Bobby's voice....
Easiest question ever.
That's easy, it's...
The Knife - Tomorrow In A Year.
Swedish techno duo go all opera, with tragic results.
Yes,
had high hopes. Still haven't made it all the way through the bloody thing.
Don't You Want Me? No.
I had a similar experience to the OP with Crash by Human League. Awful, awful album.
..surely no experience...
...can compare to that of listening to Simon Le Bon singing about "Beads of Jism"....
in fact having heard this, I can now forgive Phil Oakey for his classic clanger .."and where there used to be some shops" (from the album before Crash)
I have a soft spot for "Crash"
I think it's the contrast between Phil & the girls' ultra-english vocals and the super-shiny Jam & Lewis production which I like... it's far, far, far from my favourite album of theirs, but it makes me smile and has a few good tracks. I also think it was around the same time that ABC subsumed themselves into US electro R&B with the "Zillionaire" album, maybe it was a Sheffield thing...
It's the Jam & Lewis
production that saves it for me. I think it was fairly clear on the previous album that the League had run out of ideas.
It can't be that bad
this is pretty good isn't it?
Sheffield meets Jam & Lewis, what's not to like?
Surely the Duran's
cover album and their version of 'White Lines' is w9orse than anything else they committed to tape. And don't get me started on their Cosetello n Dylan covers
No........same album but
911 Is a Joke.
You really do have to see/hear it to believe it!
May God have mercy on us all!
...the two absent Taylors...
..must have laughed their arses off when they saw this.
Still you've got to hand it to Le Bon, surely only Jagger can top him in the "frontman who has no shame" stakes...
Made palatable only
by the presence of Blanche Hunt on keyboards.
David Sylvian
I love so many of his records. But Manafon? Surely it's only possible to like it if you absolutely hate melody, tunes and music in general?
Emma Townshend
Anyone remember her? I bought her first single, The Last Time I Saw Sadie, which I loved, and still listen to occasionally. I bought the album. It was awful, a classic case of "one good song and a load of filler."
However, I think the album I bought and most hated was Joni Mitchell's Travelogue. I get quite irrational talking about it, so I'll say no more on the subject.
Except that I really hate it. And that it pisses on her peerless legacy. And the arranger should have been sacked. Or shot.
If you mean actually listened to and
...tried to like, then it would be Bowie's "Never Let Me Down".
Worst album which didn't even warrant a second spin? There have been loads. I don't know them well enough to hate them. I had to sit through a Mariah Carey CD once, does that count?
I like the title track
and play it often. The rest... less so.
.people tend to forget Zeroes (Bowie's nod to "Raspberry Beret")
...which, along with the title track and Time Will Crawl, make the album slightly more worth while than common perception would suggest
Tom Yorke - Eraser(?)
I may have got the title wrong but his first and I hope only solo album was really very shite. I expected it to be good and it is probably the worst album I own. It's just whiney, pretentious wank.
And yet better than "The Kings In Limbo"
.
TMR
sorry to be so bleedin' obvious
Sorry, not at all obvious to
Sorry, not at all obvious to me. Please enlighten.
a clue
I like the way you have gone
I like the way you have gone to extra trouble to not give the answer, but yes I can now work it out.
By a country mile
The latest Black Eyed Peas album. Even worse than the previous. Every time you believe that you have just heard the worst track ever committed to any recorded medium the next track proves you wrong by being even worse. Will I am may well be the devil. (he can't be can he? the devil has all the best tunes after all, not the mock dance rap pap)
A Night At The Opera
I shared a house with my best friend who bought this album and played it to death. His death. Mwahahahaha.
Haha!
Have an up for making me chuckle, Neil.
However: I think A Night At The Opera is a fucking brilliant album, containing more choons, musicianship, wit, campery and sheer bloody fun than 95% of other albums.
So there.
NATO is their finest moment
Freddie and the boys did make some putrid records, though.
I tend not to keep bad albums.
So for one to imprint itself on me, what needs to happen is I need to be surrounded by people who love the album I hate and who insist on playing it to the exclusion of everything else nomatter how much I protest.
So even though I think Brothers In Arms is a poor album, I don't hate it. No one ever inflicted it on me.
However, that bloody Joshua Tree...
I get an unpleasant Proustian rush to Cumbernauld in the eighties every time I hear the opening chords to With Or Without You.
Much as I like Kraftwerk..
The first album(s) is/are pretty much unlistenable. (They were originally released as individual albums, I had them as a gatefold double-album on Vertigo. Or it might have been the other way round..)
Kapital by Laibach is similarly pretty hard going.
Both, however, are as of the sweetest, warmest honey being poured into your ears by angels when compared to the unutterable horror of Tragic Kingdom by No Doubt. I listened to it once and threw it away. I wasn't going to have it soiling my CD rack.
Standing Out For The Wrong Reasons
Milburn: Well Well Well
I'll admit it, I was a student, easily persuaded by the latest musical trends at the time (I even bought the first Kooks album!) and, because of their 'connection' with the Arctic Monkeys, I bought this dullfest by Milburn. I should've known it was going to be bad from the off; I should've understood their irrelevance and saved the £10 I spent for something else. A haircut, perhaps? It's not that it's terrible (although it is pretty banal), it's just that, it turns out Milburn were to the Arctic Monkeys what Billy J. Kramer and The Dakotas were to The Beatles. Relevant because they're from the same scene, but irrelevant because compared to their contemporaries, they just aren't very good.
Apart from Night at the Opera
I haven't heard any of the albums mentioned so far, so I'll nominate OK Computer. I'd never heard any Radiohead before it, struggled to play it right through once, and immediately gave it away to someone I disliked. I've made a point of avoiding Radiohead ever since.
P J Harvey "Let England Shake"
I'm sorry, but when the dust settles everyone who has so far fallen for this album will be left feeling slightly foolish when they realise what an absolute stinker it is.
It is clumsy, wholly lacking in subtlety, and if anything an outright insult to the generation it sets out to eulogise.
There is no synthesis; she does nothing to cast the horror of war - particularly the first world war - in a new light. She basically just presents us with the bare materials of her art instead of fashioning something new, and her work only appears brave and distinctive because there are so few other major rock artists who are attempting to address anything in such direct terms at the moment.
"I've seen and done things I want to forget;
I've seen soldiers fall like lumps of meat,
Blown and shot out beyond belief.
Arms and legs were in the trees."
She pulls off the near-impossible feat of making Billy Bragg, William McGonagall and even Nigel Molesworth look nuanced.
I wouldn't go as far...
...as "absolute stinker", but it's definitely not any better than average to these ears, which makes it PJ Harvey's worst record by a country mile. Until LES, she could have boasted of never having made a record that was less than exceptionally good, and several that are close to genius. Not this one.
'Psychcocandy' J & M..
Oh lord how I tried to like this & how much I grew to hate it.
It captured that end of the line rock music nowhere to go now so let's begat a new orthodoxy of crappy indy rock meets Velvets feedback & 60s pop in a twelve bar fuzzy drone dirge right slap bang in Thatcher's depressing Britain - a dismally narcotic weedy amplified whine of solipsistic hopelessness in black leather jackets & twatty haircuts.
And to cap it all Alan McGee was involved.
Ye Gods..
I do like a bit of J&M
but I still enjoyed your nicely pithy post.
Thank you
Just had to get it off my chest.
In my early teens I had a
In my early teens I had a terrible habit of buying albums by one hit wonders. One that lives long in the memory was the sheer awfulness of an LP by Colonel Abrahams (ooh he was trapped, like a fool in a cage).
I think we should form a secret club
as I also have a copy. I had totally forgotten about it until reading your post. I could have nightmares tonight.
I think Boards Of Canada also have that album...
From the same era - the debut by Paul Hardcastle…
His first two singles, “19” and “Just For Money”, had all those infectious stuttering samples, which seemed quite revolutionary at the time.
Sadly the remainder of his debut album, was largely dominated by third rate jazz funk, knocked out on a Fairlight.
Also from that period was an album by Oran “Juice” Jones, which I was tempted to buy off the back of his hit, “Walking in The Rain”. Thankfully my pocket money did not stretch to this, I wonder if any of the massive bought this?
Yes, but did you also buy
Yes, but did you also buy the album by 'red head king pin' who had a hit with 'do the right thing'? I may be the only person in the world to have bought both.
Shirehorses
First album - fantastic our kid!
second? absolute bobbins.
Is it me arse
No Big Sizes, Bellow and Tony are class, our kid
I have been told. Constipation...
Arseholes was my favourite. Even now it can reduce me to tears of laughter.
as bad as it gets
Pete Shelley's solo 'experimental' electronic album 'Sky Yen'.
It has absolutely no redeeming features.
None. Not a sausage. Bugger all.
Coronation St:The Album
This is quite poor.
Chinese Democracy...
...I must admit I have never listened to this monstrosity all the way through, but a quick shuffle through a cheap download gave me some idea of the true horror..
Angel - On earth as it is in heaven
Hair metal is almost always terrible beyond belief, but these guys were the nadir. With the long feathered hair and white silk jumpsuits, these guys made Poison look like a rugby team.
Depends what you mean by "worst"
Shooting fish in a barrel I know, but my sisters had the soundtrack to puzzlingly huge Grease. I know it has brought pleasure to deluded millions but even leaving aside the ninth-rate quality of most of it, did no-one notice that John Travolta's "Sandy" is scrotum-tighteningly terrible in every way ? For me the (ahem) gold standard for Fucking Awful. And I heard it All The Time.
Frankie Vali's title track...
...is mind-bendingly good and more than makes up for the rest of the album -
I've heard the new Beady Eye
I've heard the new Beady Eye album...
Come on, just how bad is it.
Come on, just how bad is it? Would any sane person actually buy it?
Ricky Tomlinson: "Music my Arse"
I'm curious about this CD from 2001, "Music my Arse" by the well-known Brookside and Royle Family actor Ricky Tomlinson.
I confess that I've not heard the album, but I can only imagine that it is quite staggeringly bad. Has any member of the Massive heard it - or at least part of it? If so, do tell...
It's been mentioned in debates before
but the worst album ever committed to vinyl is clearly
Emerson Lake and Palmer - Love Beach
here's the title track which is one of the better songs on the album...
OK, you win
That was horrific.
Build a Rocket Boys!
Again, not going to be a very popular opinion round these parts, but boy is it dull.
I can handle records that are bad, but I can't take records as heroically insipid as this. The opener, The Birds, is 8 minutes of the most lumpen, overblown, tedious plod ever put to record. I defy anyone but the most ardent Elbow fan to make it through the entire 8 minutes. As if that wasn't enough it comes back again with The Birds (The Reprise).
It just doesn't have any choons. All the rave reviews remind me of the similar reviews that The Second Coming and Be Here Now received following similarly successful albums.
The Second Coming
Never as bad as people make out. Great record.
A good EP maybe
...Ten Story Love Song and Breaking Into Heaven are highly respectable, but the low points are SOOOO bad that I wouldn't even use the word "good" let alone "great" - (I know people that like this better than the first album and they tend to be Metallica fans)
To my ears...
...near enough the entire record stinks. Ten Story Love Song is good. But then I don't particularly rate "The Stone Roses" as any better than an OK album either. Some definite high points, but mostly pretty middle-of-the-road.
Although, let's not have that conversation again. I seem to remember doing it to death relatively recently.
Agree, at first listen at least
I've loved Elbow since they first released "Asleep In The Back", but "BARB" has really disappointed me. At least "The Seldom-Seen Kid" had a few immediately grabby tracks like "Grounds For Divorce", "The Bones of You", "Mirrorball" and "One Day Like This", but when I first listened to "BARB" yesterday I was actually rather bored. Yes, "Lippy Kids" is wonderful, but there's just too little variety here, and it all seems so sombre and miserable. Maybe it will get better with repeated plays, but for now I'm disappointed.
The Fall of the House of Usher
Much as I love Peter Hammill, I'm not sure I'll ever forgive him for this:
Yes.
Frightful thing.
At least it got the Poe out of his system.
That is
beyond bad!
No wonder his partner said it's 'Over'.
You can't argue with a sick mind
Joe Walsh 'live' record from about 1976. God it was awful and I absolutely loved his stuff at the time. Self indulgent wankery of the highest order, he even managed to ruin Rocky Mountain Way.