The Horror! Nite Songs' 50 Worst Albums Ever Part 1 (50-41)

Well, we did the intro yesterday and I guess we can't put this off any longer unfortunately. Hold yer noses, we're going in, the Nite Songs Worst 50 Albums Ever countdown officially starts here...

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50. BAD RELIGION - "Into The Unknown" (1983)

Of course, nowadays Bad Religion are rightly hailed as a seminal LA punk band (we'll ignore the fact that Brett Gurewitz's Epitaph label was responsible for inflicting the musical abortion that is Falling In Reverse on the world in recent years) but it almost didn't happen like that. Following their furious 1982 debut How Could Hell Be Any Worse?, the group decided on a radical change of direction by going prog, complete with synthesisers. I mean, fair play, they weren't the only early US punk band to try a change of sound that confused their fans (fellow early '80s hardcore types TSOL infamously first went goth/art-rock and then biker rock) but it's safe to say that jumping over to the sort of music that punk was supposed to kill off was always gonna be risky.

Predictably the result was disastrous - the band's rhythm section quit in protest, attendances at gigs plummeted with people walking out of the door as soon as they saw a synthesiser being brought on stage and the band would have split by 1984. Obviously the split turned out to be temporary and by the time their next record, 1988's classic Suffer came out, they'd reverted back to the sound they made their name with. Even allowing for the change of sound though, the fact is that Bad Religion at this early point simply weren't a technically savvy enough band to get to grips with prog and Into The Unknown just sounds like an unfocused mess for the most part. Still, they were young and learning so we'll stick this in at number 50 and let them off with a warning...

49. SUPERGRASS - "Supergrass" (1999)

As we'll see going down this list, the fallout from Britpop resulted in a fair few below par albums from bands who'd been all conquering a few years previously. Supergrass were one such case - their debut album I Should Coco was, apart from the "more irritating than a dose of scabies" Alright, a fast 'n' fun slice of teenage pop-punk and the follow-up In It For The Money (which we covered on Garbage Days Revisited a couple of months back) was even better with the group beefing out the sound to good effect with some of their best material (Sun Hits The Sky, Going Out, Richard III, Tonight, Hollow Little Reign). The chance of them following Sleeper, Echobelly et al down the dumper seemed like an unlikely scenario.

Yet with album number three they very nearly blew it. This eponymous third effort's lead-off single Pumping On Your Stereo was a fun slice of Stonesy raunch with a sly nod to Bowie's Rebel Rebel. Unfortunately though, that was pretty much as good as it got - the plodding pedestrian second single Moving was a lot closer to the rest of the album in terms of quality and much of it was just utterly forgettable. Which as a band who've built their reputation as high octane sugar-rush teenage pop-punks, is absolutely the last thing you'd want to be surely.

The group would at least recover a bit - their next effort Life On Other Planets was a more respectable effort and their fifth Road To Rouen was more hit and miss than actively dreadful but Supergrass definitely felt like the point where the spell they'd cast so effortlessly in 1995 was broken and the band were never quite the same afterwards.

48. QUEEN & PAUL RODGERS - "The Cosmos Rocks" (2008)

Another one which I touched on in the Album By Album feature I did on Queen a while ago, all that The Cosmos Rocks really proved is that without Freddie Mercury, Queen were actually rather dull. I guess this collaboration could've maybe worked under different circumstances but the introduction of ex-Free/Bad Company frontman Paul Rodgers' earthy blues rock voice to the Queen mix saw Brian May and Roger Taylor pretty much jettison the flamboyant glam rock that was the band’s main selling point to leave something that was just boring for the most part. Add to that a set of decidedly below-par tunes (C-Lebrity's embarrassing attempt to be "down with the kids" by slagging off reality TV stars - the musical equivalent of the "hey, what's this? It's got a good beat!" embarrassing dad off of The Mary Whitehouse Experience - being a particular low point) and it all made for a decidedly damp squib of a comeback for this once legendary band.

May and Taylor would show Rodgers the door soon afterwards, draft in a more Mercury influenced singer in Adam Lambert and retreat to the enormodome revival circuit. But really, The Cosmos Rocks is proof positive that some legends are really best left undisturbed to leave us with the good memories rather than trying to recapture that lightning in a bottle that was Queen’s imperial phase.

47. BLUR - "The Great Escape" (1995)

The general consensus when we look back at the Britpop fight for supremacy is that while Oasis won the battle, it was Blur who won the war with their albums generally standing the test of time a bit better than the Gallaghers' more formulaic efforts. But even Blur weren't averse to dropping the odd clanger here and there and The Great Escape despite being released at the zenith of the band's popularity was also the point where the whole thing nearly imploded.

Having already mined the Ray Davies seam of everyday urban songwriting to good effect on Modern Life Is Rubbish and Parklife, trying to repeat the same trick on a third album was always going to be risky and unfortunately for the most part The Great Escape was a hollow, smug and unlikeable effort with the honourable exception of the two gorgeous torch songs The Universal and He Thought Of Cars. Elsewhere though the likes of Stereotypes, It Could Be You and Country House were truly wretched sub-Chas 'n' Dave efforts and the album was swiftly disowned by the band who would move into more experimental waters and effectively call the death knell on the Britpop scene they created with 1997's Blur. As it turned out, it might just be the smartest move they made.

46. SKIN – “Fleshwounds” (2003)

Skunk Anansie, to me, were at their best on their debut album Paranoid And Sunburnt, the sheer raw fury of which still sounds great all these years later. Unfortunately, it was all downhill for them from then on – second album Stoosh had its moments but essentially sounded like the first with the rough edges (which had been the band’s main selling point) smoothed off. By the time of album number three Post Orgasmic Chill, the group had slumped into MOR hell and it wasn’t much of a surprise when they disbanded soon afterwards.

Unsurprisingly, lead singer Skin would quickly go down the solo album route but unfortunately Fleshwounds was a huge disappointment with the dreaded outside writers (including Robbie Williams’ old right hand man Guy Chambers) being drafted in and the result was a disjointed album so devoid of the bite and spirit of old that it might as well have been Dina Carroll singing it. Skunk Anansie would reunite a couple of years later and remain together to this day with Skin even being awarded the MBE recently. She’s left a good musical legacy behind her but Fleshwounds is a definite blot on the landscape – a classic example of a very talented and charismatic singer being neutered by soulless MOR men with pound signs in their eyes.

45. QUEENS OF THE STONE AGE - "Era Vulgaris" (2007)

It's often been said that many groups work well as a benevolent dictatorship and these days, it appears that's pretty much what Queens of the Stone Age are under Josh Homme. However, the fact remains that the band were at their best (on 2000's Rated R and 2002's Songs For The Deaf) when they had three songwriters in the fold in the form of Homme, bassist Nick Oliveri (who added a much needed streak of chaos to Homme's cold calculating style) and frequent collaborator Mark Lanegan. And it's maybe not a surprise that when Oliveri left after Songs For The Deaf, a big part of the band's sound went with him.

2005's Lullabies To Paralyze was a solid effort rather than a great one but by this point Homme and Lanegan were just to say keeping the ship afloat even though the absence of Oliveri's songs and the rabid punk insanity they brought did leave a bit of a gap. However, the departure of Lanegan to leave QOTSA as essentially a Homme solo project for Era Vulgaris really did have disastrous results with an album so lifeless and moribund you could've bottled it and sold it as valium with the truly awful plinky-plonky plastic soul of Make It Wit'chu being a particular low point. It would prove to be the last QOTSA album in six years with Homme, perhaps wisely, moving on to other projects such as Them Crooked Vultures.

44. BRIDES OF DESTRUCTION - "Runaway Brides" (2005)

When Motley Crue's Nikki Sixx and LA Guns' Tracii Guns decided to put their heads together to form a 21st century sleaze rock supergroup in the form of Brides of Destruction, it looked for a bit as if they might get away with it. The first Brides album, Here Come The Brides was actually a pretty solid effort, mixing sleaze rock, punk and a little bit of goth/industrial to good effect. However, Sixx's departure to join a reformed Crue would rapidly throw everything into a tailspin. Guns, singer London LeGrand and drummer Scot Coogan would quickly set about putting a new line-up together, roping in ex-Amen bassist Scott Sorry and none other than Ginger Wildheart as second guitarist. However, the union would be short-lived as after helping Tracii co-write a few songs, Ginger would end up leaving the band a few dates into his first tour with them after a backstage argument between him and LeGrand ended with the latter being knocked out!

Tracii would soldier on but interest in the band was by now seriously waning and when Runaway Brides surfaced in late 2005, it completely lacked the spark of their debut with the tunes being anonymous and the performances flat. It seems most people knew it too - legend has it that their UK tour around this time saw attendances down in the single figures mark at at least one gig! Predictably by 2006, the band was no more with Tracii putting his own line-up of LA Guns together after Phil Lewis and Steve Riley decided not to reunite with him and Scott joining Ginger in the late noughties Wildhearts line-up.

43. THE STRUTS - "Young And Dangerous" (2018)

Young? Yes. Dangerous? Not exactly on the evidence of this album. When Derby glam rockers the Struts first poked their heads above the parapet with 2014's Everybody Wants, they bore all the hallmarks of a potentially really good band who were just over-producing their material (or maybe allowing their material to be over-produced by their label) a tiny bit more than they should. Having seen them live around this time where their songs packed much more of a punch than their studio versions, it seemed obvious to anyone that a more lean, mean and stripped down production and cutting out the endless synths and needless orchestral arrangements was all they needed to really get things right.

Unfortunately it seems that no-one told the band (or perhaps more pertinently their label and management) this - when their second album Young And Dangerous appeared in 2018, it took all the problems of their debut and amplified them tenfold with even more needless studio gloss to mask the lack of decent tunes and a worrying tendency toward sounding like MOR bores Maroon 5. And as for their attempts at trying to go hip-hop...yeesh, let's not even go there.

Fortunately, this story does have a happy ending - the lockdown would see the band recording album number three Strange Days (review here) with a much more back-to-basics approach and finally delivering the full on rock monster of an album that anyone who'd seen them live knew they were capable of all along. But Young And Dangerous should serve as a warning lesson to all up and coming groups, too much over production and listening to your A&R man and label without putting your own ideas forward can lead to your sound being almost lethally blunted.

42. THE DARKNESS – “One Way Ticket To Hell And Back” (2005)

Okay, let’s get one thing straight here – I like the Darkness. They were the band who rescued the UK music scene from the twin horrors that were the artless thuggery of nu-metal and the obnoxious yuckling of frat-punk and when Permission To Land, their riotous debut album, stormed the charts and effectively killed off both of those movements with one stone, a lot of people breathed a sigh of relief.

It’s just a pity that they followed this up with One Way Ticket To Hell And Back, an album which is pretty much the definition of the term “sophomore slump”. With the group given a free rein by their label to do what they wanted, it allowed Justin Hawkins to basically indulge in his most ridiculously OTT rockstar fantasies when there should really have been someone around to gently sit him down and say “okay look, you need to listen to me – that will not work”. Despite the occasional half-decent moment (Dinner Lady Arms and Hazel Eyes are the best of a bad bunch), One Way Ticket... was the sound of an in-joke that just wasn’t funny anymore being stretched out to 50 minutes as epitomised by the truly cringy English Country Garden.

The backlash was absolutely vicious but unfortunately it was largely justified. Chart positions tanked and the band would have disbanded within a year. They would subsequently reform five years hence and, fair play to them, their five album run since then has (with the exception of the slightly below-par Last Of Our Kind) generally been well on the right side of good. But I suspect even now that Justin and co look back on this one with more than a little embarrassment.

41. THE OFFSPRING - "Conspiracy Of One" (2000)

The problem with being in a band who trade on belly laughs for sales is that there will come a point where the joke simply stops being funny and in the case of the Offspring, Conspiracy of One was very much it. When the group broke through with Smash in 1994, their fratboy humour on songs like Self-Esteem and the punk energy of Come Out And Play and Bad Habit at least marked them out as doing something different. Even as early as its follow-up, 1997's Ixnay On The Hombre though, the cracks of this band being a one-trick pony were starting to show and by 1998's Americana which properly took them into the upper echelons of the charts with Pretty Fly (For A White Guy) (itself essentially Come Out And Play with different words), it was becoming pretty obvious that the band were flat out of ideas.

Conspiracy Of One was the end result and it maybe says a lot that the lead single Original Prankster was essentially Pretty Fly with different lyrics making it a rip-off of a song that was a rip-off itself to begin with. Elsewhere, songs like Want You Bad and One Fine Day were the sound of a band lazily phoning it in knowing that the album was gonna be a big seller whatever they put on it due to the fact that the sewage-infested wave of frat-punk was very much crashing on the shore at this point. However, as it turned out, this would be the start of the Offspring's commercial decline as it only sold a quarter of what Americana did and despite Original Prankster making the Top 10, subsequent singles would stall a bit further down the charts. Slowly but surely, frat-punk would die on the vine as people realised it was essentially a one-trick pony and started demanding more from their music and it'd take Dexter and co down with it.

Ironically enough, the Offspring resurfaced this year after a near-decade silence with the surprisingly good Let The Bad Times Roll (review here) which might just be their best album since Smash, showing them taking a more aggressive and angry approach to their work. So basically everything that Conspiracy Of One wasn't and probably a factor (along with the fact that as we'll see, frat-punk threw up some far worse offenders) that stopped it being a bit higher on this list.

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And so concludes our opening salvo in the Worst Albums Ever chart. Believe you us, it's gonna get much much worse. Part 2 will follow tomorrow...