The Horror! Nite Songs' 50 Worst Albums Ever Part 7 - The Top 5

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!"

Unfortunately on my second listen after I'd e-mailed that review off to my editor, it quickly became apparent that a) the riffs were literally all that St Anger had and b) even they weren't anywhere near the same league as Ride The Lightning or Master Of Puppets. This was a 70 minute tune free snorefest - I mean for all that people moan about Load and Reload, (and the underappreciated Garage Inc for that matter) at least those albums were interesting because it showed Metallica trying something different. Here they just sounded unspeakably dull. And if you consider what a troubled genesis this album had (as painfully laid bare on the blood-curdlingly embarrassing Some Kind Of Monster documentary which showed just how out of touch the group had become with reality by this point), it almost makes it doubly bad that this was the best they could come up with. As one review of it says, "when the most productive band member is the life coach you're paying $10,000 a week, you've got problems" Suffice to say by the time my review got published a few weeks later, I was literally reading it through my fingers with embarrassment.

To be fair, Metallica did rebound a bit and Death Magnetic, while not quite a full on return to form, was at least a solid Metallica album. But St Anger really was the sound of adding injury to insult and it would take them years to recover their credibility afterwards. Some would argue that they perhaps never really did. 

Metal Machine Music is one of those albums that seems to be a perennial fixture of Worst Albums lists although there's some who argue that it's an underrated classic. I would qualify this by saying that Lou Reed was certainly brave to release something as utterly unlistenable as this when he was starting to pick up some genuine popularity both in the States and internationally - it effectively sunk his career which had been started to flourish after Bowie citing him as an influence and helping him with his second post-Velvet Underground album Transformer gave him a handy leg up commercially at the start of his solo career and he'd managed to keep the wave rolling with two further decent solo albums in Berlin and Sally Can't Dance. Clearly Metal Machine Music was him just deciding he'd had enough of popularity and deliberately sabotaging his own career for the sake of it so you can't really accuse him of putting something unlistenable together without knowing exactly what he was doing. And in a perverse way, I kind of admire that.

Brave or not though, there's no getting round the fact that as a piece of music, Metal Machine Music is awful - I mean, if you can make it through even five minutes of this atonal racket without switching the thing off then respect to you for trying but to me it's just out and out unlistenable. I'm always reminded of an interview with my old favourites Kenickie way back in the day when their two guitarists Johnny X and Marie du Santiago were arguing over the merits of lo-fi music and Marie came up with the immortal words "It's not credibility, it's rank stupidity. Pointless shit should not be revered just because it's pointless". Fair play to her, it might not have been what she had in mind but to me that sentence sums up this album perfectly.

So I think we can basically agree here that the two above albums aren't exactly great and that both of the above artists could and often did produce material that was far superior. So when people heard that Lou Reed and Metallica would be collaborating on an album in 2012, the main reaction was a mix of puzzlement and curiosity. I mean, there's nothing to say it couldn't have worked - imagine if this had been a mix of Sally Can't Dance with Ride The Lightning's riffs? Sure, it would probably still have been a bit of a mess but it would at least have been an intriguing one.

Unfortunately Lulu ended up being a mix of both bands' worst moments taking the full on tune-free tedium of St Anger and its bludgeoning by-numbers riffs and adding Lou Reed mumbling some half-baked art-school nonsense based on the plays of Frank Wedekind about a stripper who tries to become a social climber only to end up as a prostitute. It ends up being borderline unlistenable which, to be fair, is probably what the contrary old buggers wanted but it doesn't make it any more fun to endure for the rest of us with several songs lumbering over the 10 minute mark and the 19-minute closer Junior Dad in particular being a real trial to listen to. Honestly, having teeth pulled without anaesthetic would be preferable to me having to ever listen to this train wreck again.

4. GUNS 'N' ROSES - "Chinese Democracy" (2007)

So imagine this if you will - it's been a long day at the office in the middle of winter. 5 o'clock comes around and you head out into the cold and sleet to wait for your bus home. For hours, nothing. Then just before midnight, the bus finally turns up and some fat lad in the driver's seat opens the door, throws a fistful of excrement in your face then drives off again. That's what Chinese Democracy was to us G'n'R fans essentially.

The trouble is that when you take 15 years to make an album, there's always a chance that the trends that were in vogue when you started it will now be somewhat passé and so it proved with Chinese Democracy. Had Axl Rose, Dizzy Reed and the various others who comprised Guns 'n' Roses by this point (let's be honest, the band had more comings and goings than your average brothel during this time period) pulled their collective fingers out and released this album in 1999, it would probably have at least been seen as an attempt to move the band's sound forward and be contemporary with a heavier denser almost industrial feel to several of the songs like the title track, Prostitute and Shackler's Revenge.

As it was though, it came out in 2008 and just sounded like it had passed its sell by date a decade earlier. Even the trademark ballads like Street of Dreams just sounded like out-takes from the group's previous efforts. I suppose there's an argument that given how much anticipation there was for this album, it never really stood a chance of being anything other than a disappointment but ultimately the long genesis was what did for this album - the world had moved on without Axl by the time it came out and it just sounded bloated, self-indulgent and desperately trying to chase trends which had long since become obsolete. And the fact that it took Guns 'n' Roses so long to come up with it only magnified the disappointment massively - most people's thoughts were, quite rightly, "Hang on Axl, so you got rid of Slash, Izzy and Duff, brought in a load of yes-men to replace them, took 15 years to put this together and this was the best you could do?!" Again, the phrase adding insult to injury springs to mind.

Of course, in the intervening decade, Axl has mended fences with Slash and Duff McKagan and as 2021 draws to a close, there are whispers that a new G'n'R album might be on the horizon next year. Given the group's notoriously slow work rate, I'll believe it when I see it but we shall see. If this new material helps to bury the wretched legacy of Chinese Democracy then it can only be a good thing.

3. LIMP BIZKIT - "The Unquestionable Truth (Part 1)" (2005)

The Unpolishable Turd more like as Kerrang! memorably described it. It's safe to say I was never a particularly big fan of Limp Bizkit but I'll give them their due, for five seconds in 2001 they were pretty much the biggest metal band in the world with the likes of Rollin' and My Generation and even if they did mainly sound like the Backstreet Boys with concrete block guitar riffs whacked on top, their material did at least lend itself well to being sung after several pints at the Friday night rock disco.

By 2005 though, things were very much on the ropes for them. To be honest, I could easily have put their best known album, 2000's Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavoured Water (which ran incredibly thin after just a few listens) or its "difficult" follow-up Results May Vary (a total mess which signalled the start of their commercial tailspin) but then someone reminded me of this, the group's last dying twitchings in 2005 which stiffed at number 71 in the charts and pretty much signalled the end for them. The group had already seen their star start to wane with nu-metal being well on the way out by this point and gone through a period of line-up instability with drummer John Otto and guitarist Wes Borland both leaving although the latter would subsequently rejoin in time to record this effort.

In what could probably be seen as a last roll of the dice, the group decided that the best way out was to simply crank up the volume and get heavy but the result was a club-footed crock of an album which sounded like a dinosaur taking its last dying breath with a mix of Fred Durst's wheezing vocals, the generic brickbat riffs which made St Anger look like Thin Lizzy by comparison and lyrics like "I see someone in a rage killing Dimebag on stage" which came across as the tackiest kind of attention seeking. Let's be honest, Durst was never an especially  likeable frontman and his mixture of arrogance, brashness and money-grabbing faux-angst never made for a particularly palatable combination at the best of times but The Unquestionable Truth sounded like a band of old geezers who were still swanning around like the belles of the ball, completely oblivious to the fact that times had long since mercifully moved on without them.

Thankfully, Limp Bizkit would break up soon after this although Durst has reformed the band since. Suffice to say I've not exactly been motivated to check any of their new material out though.

2. OASIS - "Be Here Now" (1997)

If ever there was an album that epitomised a band who could previously do almost no wrong absolutely trashing their reputation in one fell swoop then it's Be Here Now. Let's be honest, in 1996 Oasis were comfortably the biggest band in Britain and despite what some may tell you, it was deserved. In Definitely Maybe, they'd come up with one of the best debut albums ever and it still sounds nearly flawless today. Its follow-up (What's The Story) Morning Glory catapulted them to superstar status, selling out arenas through that summer even if, whisper it quietly, it wasn't quite as perfect as their debut (the plodding Hey Now and the lumpen Cast No Shadow were definitely warning signs as to what was coming looking back). Either way though, with Britpop starting to falter in 1997 especially with the group's one time major rivals at the top of the hill Blur having abandoned it altogether for more art-rock waters, the onus was on for the Gallagher brothers to deliver something to reaffirm the good times feel of Britpop against the grey clouds of OK Computer and Urban Hymns that were fast rolling in from the horizon.

Unfortunately, Be Here Now was the exact opposite, a bloated 70 minute coked up trainwreck of an album that seemed to prove that Noel Gallagher had well and truly lost the plot. Crashing in with the overblown seven minute D'You Know What I Mean? which seemed to jettison the everyman writing style of old for a bunch of rich man's doggerel ("I met my maker and made him cry, and on my shoulder he asked me why his people won't fly through the storm, I said 'listen up man, they don't even know you're born'"), it was unfortunately only the tip of the iceberg with the likes of My Big Mouth, The Girl With The Dirty Shirt and especially the eight minute snoreathon of All Around The World sounding like Oasis had swallowed the "we're the new Beatles" hype whole while ignoring that a) these tunes were so weak that Lennon and McCartney wouldn't even have put them out as B-sides and b) Oasis in their prime were always so much more than just a blatant Fab Four rip-off.

The over-production doesn't help matters either - even songs like Stand By Me which you suspect could work in a more stripped-down mode are completely hobbled by being layered up with string sections and about fifty guitar overdubs until any sort of subtlety is well and truly lost. Only the yearning Don't Go Away which shows a bit of rare vulnerability here really stands up as anything that could have been on the group's first two albums without being terminally embarrassed. I still remember buying this album as an 18 year old and being utterly heartbroken at how awful it was given how much I'd loved this band prior to it (the fact that it had received near blanket praise in reviews across the board didn't help either - I suspect some money may just have changed hands). It rapidly found its way to the record exchange for two quid soon afterwards.

Oasis would continue on for a decade afterwards of course and their next couple of albums, Standing On The Shoulder Of Giants and Heathen Chemistry were at least a bit better even if they were nowhere near the standard of their first two before they slumped into a well of sub-mediocrity with Don't Believe The Truth and Dig Out Your Soul. But this album to me remains their low point just because it was the point where the spell was well and truly broken and Oasis were no longer "mega". Given the long conflict between the two, it seems ironic that Britpop was killed off equally by Blur transcending it and Oasis sinking into all of its worst excesses.

1. THE CLASH - "Cut The Crap" (1985)

So what exactly is it that makes a truly awful album by the Nite Songs criteria? Well, in the perfect shitstorm, it's the sound of a previously untouchable band jettisoning everything that made them great in their prime and turning in something with wretched songwriting, poor tunes, unlistenable production and a general air of hopelessness about the whole thing.

Which is why Cut The Crap is at the top of this list. Similar to Oasis above, the Clash were a group who could do almost no wrong with their imperial phase line-up of Joe Strummer, Mick Jones, Paul Simonon and Topper Headon. From the red raw punk of their debut through the "inconsistent but with enough good moments to make it worth a listen" more rock approach of Give 'Em Enough Rope to the double blast of London Calling and Sandinista! which saw them expanding their horizons to brilliant effect and should have set them up as a force to be reckoned with for the rest of the '80s, they may have put the odd foot wrong here and there but they were regarded as being at the top of their game for a good reason at this point.

Things started to go wrong for the band, looking back, with 1982's Combat Rock, a concerted attempt to break the American market where the band were spending most of their time by this point. The departure of Headon to be replaced by his predecessor Terry Chimes could have backfired on them but the record was generally okay if not quite up to the standard of its predecessors with Rock The Casbah and Should I Stay Or Should I Go? at least giving them two decent singles and the likes of Know Your Rights and Straight To Hell being highlights as well.

There was a big black cloud on the horizon though in the form of Bernie Rhodes, recently reinstated as the band's manager at this point. Soon after the group had finished touring Combat Rock, both Chimes and, much more damagingly, Jones were sacked from the band by Rhodes and Strummer. The truth is that Jones and Rhodes had never really got on and the latter had already tried to sack the former around the time of Give 'Em Enough Rope only for the other band members to stand up for him and dispense with the manager's services instead. It seems that Rhodes hadn't forgotten this and, with tensions between Jones and Strummer much worse in '82 than they were in '78, quickly made his move.

Strummer and Simonon would quickly put a new band together under Rhodes' tutelage featuring Nick Sheppard, former guitarist with the Cortinas (regulars at the Roxy in the first wave of punk), fellow six stringer Vince White to allow Strummer to concentrate on being a frontman and drummer Pete Howard who would later go on to join Eat, Vent 414, Queen Adreena and the Wonder Stuff. The plan going in was to record an album which dispensed with the reggae and dub influences and be more of a back to basics straight up punk affair but given that punk, even in its second wave early '80s form was well and truly flatlining by this point in the UK, you have to wonder what the logic of this was.

By the time the group went into the studio in early 1985, things were already falling apart. Strummer and Rhodes were at loggerheads with the latter insisting on complete control over producing the album. As a consequence, White, Simonon and Howard hardly appear on the album with primitive synths and drum machines being used on most tracks. The fact that Mick Jones had recently resurfaced using a (briefly) successful take on a similar formula with his new Big Audio Dynamite project might just have had a bearing on this but the difference in quality between the two was like night and day - the play school drums and keys on Cut The Crap had it sounding dated almost instantly upon release.

This would have been bad enough but the songwriting on this album (with Strummer and Rhodes sharing credits) is well south of dismal too, real punk-by-numbers stuff that had probably already gone out of date by the time the band had put out London Calling six years earlier - titles like Dirty Punk, We Are The Clash, Dictator and Fingerpoppin' are every bit as wretched and hackneyed as you'd think with the clichés being layered on like there's no tomorrow. The only slight spot of light comes with This Is England which crept into the lower reaches of the Top 40 upon being released as a single with its gang-chant chorus and something approaching a memorable tune but even that would've struggled to hold its place on any other Clash album.

The fallout was devastating - the album was panned and crept into the lower reaches of the Top 20 before disappearing with an anvil around its neck. Strummer was so horrified on hearing the final results that he broke up the band by the end of the year - both him and Howard had threatened to quit during the course of the recording over their disagreements with Rhodes. The group subsequently buried the album and none of the tracks from it have turned up on any retrospectives.

All in all, Cut The Crap and the run-up to it took a legendary band in their prime and well and truly cut them off at the knees to the point where they felt as if they couldn't carry on afterwards. If you think that only a few years before, this was the group who'd put out songs like Guns of Brixton, Clampdown, Safe European Home, The Magnificent Seven, Rudie Can't Fail etc then it truly is heartbreaking. I said at the start of this column that one of the main measures I judged this chart with was by how far the mis-steps in question caused the band to fall as well as how big the mis-steps were and for that reason, Cut The Crap had to be at the top of this list, the worst album of all time in the view of this webzine. 

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And breathe folks, it's over. Thanks for sticking with this list to the end - a lot of this, as you can imagine, has been a decidedly painful trip down memory lane for your friendly writer but there's a definite feeling of catharsis for having finally got it finished. In the meantime, enjoy Halloween and we'll be back to concentrating on good music as of tomorrow.