The Horror! Nite Songs' 50 Worst Albums Ever Part 5 (15-11)

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)

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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, completely lacking the melodies and choruses that mark the best glam metal out while Tom G Warrior's grunting vocals just don't suit the material at all. The group's reputation was completely shot and the group's fanbase rapidly deserted them upon hearing the likes of Seduce Me Tonight and Dance Sleazy. The group would frantically try to row back to their old sound for their next effort but the damage had been done and they split in 1992. The group have reformed in recent years but given that Warrior has gone on record as describing this album as "a piece of shit", I don't think we'll be seeing any of the material from it in their live set any time soon.

14. WHEATUS - "Hand Over Your Loved Ones" (2003)

Yes yes I know, even twenty years later slagging off Wheatus feels a bit like shooting fish in a barrel but this sophomore album which comprehensively signalled the end of their five minutes in the big time really was bloody awful. The group managed to chalk up a Top 5 hit with their "fun the first time you heard it but increasingly irritating afterwards" Teenage Dirtbag single but it was pretty much all downhill after that both commercially and in terms of output quality. Put it this way, the first time they played near me it was at the 1500 capacity Leeds Town Hall, the second time (around the time of this album) it was at the 400-odd capacity Joseph's Well and third time when they were plugging their third album (which for reasons which will soon become obvious I never got round to listening to) it was at Bradford Walkabout. That really tells you everything.

Hand Over Your Loved Ones was the musical equivalent of David Brent trying to write a pop-punk album - I mean, there's a track on here called The Song That I Wrote When You Dissed Me which is every bit as terrible as its title suggests while Lemonade which appears to be about finding out your girlfriend has been cheating on you with your best mate starts with the frankly worrying line of "Just tell me if his dick is bigger than mine". Suffice to say it tanked, Wheatus were gone from their major label deal with Sony soon afterwards (subsequently re-recording the album as the, urr, "wittily" titled Suck Fony - there's a phrase about polishing turds that springs to mind) and that was pretty much that. Scarily they are still out there playing away to their remaining faithful devotees for which I suppose they at least deserve a grudging respect from me for staying power but this remains a truly dreadful album.

13. CHRIS CORNELL - "Scream" (2009)

Oh Chris, what were you thinking man? The prospect of the former Soundgarden and Audioslave frontman teaming up with veteran pop producer Timbaland for his first solo album was definitely a bit of a left field idea but it needn't necessarily have been a disaster - as we've discussed in the No Doubt entry earlier in this list, sometimes these things can work when the minds involve truly mesh and produce something genuinely special.

And then there's albums like Scream which just seemed do the opposite and take all the worst elements of Cornell and Timbaland's respective solo outputs to come up with something genuinely putrid with Cornell's bellowing vocals mixing incredibly uneasily with the hackneyed electro-beats and samples and the decidedly misogynistic lyrics in places making this real head-in-hands territory. It may have been a good idea on paper but the end result is jarring to the point of outright unlistenability. Not good.

12. DURAN DURAN - "Thank You" (1995)

As I've mentioned already in this feature, slagging off covers albums is a bit like the old fish, barrel, shotgun scenario but even by those relatively lowly standards, this effort from Duran Duran (which regularly tops "Worst Albums Ever" polls) deserves a mention. The standard covers on here such as the Doors' Crystal Ship, Lou Reed's Perfect Day and Bob Dylan's Lay Lady Lay are simply below-par and if it was a whole album of stuff like this then Thank You would merely be just a bit rubbish in a "well, it's a covers album innit?" kind of way.

No, what elevates it to being truly hilariously terrible is Duran Duran, god love 'em, attempting to be contemporary by throwing a few curveballs in there. Did we really need to hear them attempting to cover White Lines (Don't Do It)? Or (and I swear I'm not making this up), Public Enemy's 911 Is A Joke? On the evidence of this, no, we really REALLY didn't. I'll always stick up for Duran Duran as being a good '80s/early '90s pop band and they've had their fair share of dancefloor filler classics in their back catalogue but Thank You really was an absolutely colossal mis-step from them.

11. VAN HALEN - "Van Halen III" (1998)

Van Halen with Dave Lee Roth = awesome. Van Halen with Sammy Hagar = boring. Van Halen with...erm, that dolt from Extreme? Oh lordy... It's safe to say that by the mid-'90s, Van Halen's star was very much in the descendant. Sammy Hagar, for all his faults, had at least given them a commercial shot in the arm by moving their sound towards safer AOR territory but after he and Eddie fell out in the wake of the Balance album in 1995, the group quickly turned back to Roth whose own solo career was on shaky ground after the commercial flop of Your Filthy Little Mouth. Unfortunately despite a couple of new tracks being recorded for a Best Of, the old animosities between DLR and EVH quickly came to the fore again and 1997 would see Roth leaving again to resume his solo career with 1998's under-rated DLR Band.

Scrabbling around to find a new frontman, the group settled on Gary Cherone, formerly of Extreme who are probably best known for the ultra-wimpy ballad More Than Words and the, um, "hilarious" punning of Get The Funk Out. The result was a total trial of an album, 55 minutes of lumpen noodling and nothing even vaguely approaching a memorable tune. Unsurprisingly Cherone was ousted soon afterwards and the group went on hiatus, eventually reuniting first with Hagar in the mid-noughties and then with Roth in the early teens for their triumphant swansong A Different Kind Of Truth, a much more fitting send off for one of the most important rock bands of their era.

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And deep breath as we prepare to enter the Top 10. Don't worry kids, it's almost all over now...