Nite Songs

Here we go then, once more unto the breach, our official worst 5 albums ever (well, 7, there’s a three way tie in there). Seatbelts on, this is gonna get messy… PREVIOUSLY IN THIS COLUMN:   Intro  •  Part 1 (50-41)  •  Part 2 (40-31)  •  Part 3 (30-21)  •  Part 4 (20-16)   •  Part 5 (15-11)  • Part 6 (10-6) 5.= METALLICA - "St Anger" (2003) 5.= LOU REED - "Metal Machine Music" (1975) 5.= LOU REED & METALLICA - "Lulu" (2012) I'm grouping these three together for obvious reasons but basically all of them are deserving of a place in the Top 5. Bear with us, this might take a while. So, St Anger  then - there's few incidents that I look back on from my music journalism career and genuinely think "yeah, f**kinell I really got that wrong" but this album is one of 'em. I reviewed it for a print 'zine I was working for at the time and gave it 9/10 on the grounds that, in my own words, "they've rediscovered the riffs!" Un

  "The enemy is waiting on the radar and everybody’s changing sides…"  - The Vibrators  - Fighter Pilot Similar to the UK Subs last week, the Vibrators are one of those bands who will forever be associated with the punk movement - they were there at the beginning, played the Roxy and were one of the first bands to get signed when the movement broke overground. But that's far from the full story with them. Like Charlie Harper, their frontman Knox (Ian Carnochan to his friends and family) was already in his thirties when punk hit and had been doing the rounds in other musical outfits from glam rockers Despair through to folk and Irish bands for well over a decade. The group formed in late 1975 initially finding a home on the pub rock scene where they gigged frequently with another group who would start out there but quickly find a better fitting home with punk, the Stranglers. The group were viewed with some suspicion by the Pistols/Clash crowd due to their older years and

  And so we enter the Top 10 of the Worst Albums Ever list. Verily we truly are in the crap de la crap of modern times now. Hope you're ready... PREVIOUSLY IN THIS COLUMN:   Intro  •  Part 1 (50-41)  •  Part 2 (40-31)  •  Part 3 (30-21)  •  Part 4 (20-16)   • Part 5 (15-11) *** 10.= THE ROLLING STONES - "Dirty Work" (1986) 10.= MICK JAGGER - "Primitive Cool" (1987) Similar to the David Bowie entry earlier in the list, let me quantify what I'm about to say by stating that I regard the Rolling Stones as the greatest rock 'n' roll band that this septic isle of ours has ever produced and that their run of albums from 1968's Beggars Banquet  to 1973's Goat's Head Soup  is arguably, in my opinion, the greatest five album run by any band ever. However, similar again to Bowie, when you've been around for as long as the Stones have been then it's inevitable you'll drop a few clangers somewhere along the way from the limp AOR of 1976

Don't worry folks, we're nearing the end now. Here comes your third-to-last dose of musical torture... PREVIOUSLY IN THIS COLUMN:   Intro  •  Part 1 (50-41)  •  Part 2 (40-31)  •  Part 3 (30-21)  • Part 4 (20-16) *** 15. CELTIC FROST - "Cold Lake" (1988) Another case of a style change which pretty much killed off a band's career. Prior to  Cold Lake , Celtic Frost were one of the outstanding thrash bands of the mid-'80s and their debut  Morbid Tales  remains a classic of the genre to this day. However, by the late '80s, various line-up changes had seen the group start to soften their sound until by the point of 1988, they'd gone full on glam metal. Now, I'm generally someone who tends to stick up for glam metal but there's no denying that when you're a thrash band, pretty much the opposite end of the metal spectrum, this is going to be fraught with danger and by any standards,  Cold Lake  just doesn't work at all. The songs are generic,

  "It's no surprise to me, I am my own worst enemy, 'cos every now and then I kick the living shit outta me..."  - Lit - My Own Worst Enemy You may have noticed this from the recent Worst Albums feature but it's safe to say that I really didn't have a lot of time for most of the second wave of frat punk that started slithering across the Atlantic as the millennium approached. I mean, don't get me wrong, I used to like Green Day (before they decided that trying to become a punk U2 was a viable career option) and the Offspring were good for the odd belly laugh here and there but as groups like Blink 182, Sum 41, New Found Glory, the Bloodhound Gang et al started to make inroads into the charts, essentially peddling tenth rate clones of Dookie  or Smash , the whole thing just started to get incredibly tiresome. To be honest, I never had any time for that sort of puerile grossout humour anyway...call me an old sourpuss if you really must but I just like my jok

Well, here we go, into the Top 20. Given that the quality of the albums involved really is getting incredibly dismal now, we'll just be doing five albums a day from now until the end of the week. Call it an intervention for the sake of both our and your sanity. Anyway, let's get this over with shall we?... PREVIOUSLY IN THIS COLUMN:   Intro  •  Part 1 (50-41)  •  Part 2 (40-31)  • Part 3 (30-21) *** 20. NEW YORK DOLLS - "Dancing Backwards In High Heels" (2011) It shouldn't have ended like this. As we've discussed in  their Garbage Days Revisited column , when the New York Dolls returned after a three decade absence with the storming  One Day It Will Please Us To Remember Even This , it wasn't just a timely reminder of everything that made them such a great and influential band back in the '70s, it saw them bringing their sound up to date without sounding corny and actually equalling those classic tunes. Had they just left it at that, their legacy would