The Horror! Nite Songs' 50 Worst Albums Ever Part 4 (20-16)


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)

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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 undoubtedly have been assured.

Unfortunately, it was a downward spiral from thereon out. 2008's 'Cause I Sez So was a solid effort but even here there were signs that the band were losing fire and when they lost both guitarist Steve Conte and bassist Sami Yaffa to Michael Monroe's band in 2010, the alarm bells were ringing loud. Although a new line-up came together, the resulting album Dancing Backwards In High Heels was one where they might as well not have bothered. It was recorded on the cheap in a studio in Newcastle and really shows with the tinny production only surpassed by the almost total lack of decent tunes on here. I had a few friends who went along to see the Dolls on that tour and nearly all of them reported that David Johansen simply looked as if he didn't want to be there. Sure enough, the band would go on hiatus soon afterwards and Sylvain Sylvain's passing earlier this year would rule further reunions out. The Dolls deserve to be treasured as a truly pioneering band but this was certainly no way for them to bow out.


19. MOTLEY CRUE - "Saints Of Los Angeles" (2008)

Look, I'll admit I'm not the world's biggest Crue fan but I'll happily concede that they put out two absolutely storming albums in the form of Too Fast For Love and Shout At The Devil and even Girls Girls Girls and Dr Feelgood have enough good moments to make them worth a listen. But as the '80s turned to the '90s, their time was very much gone and while their self-titled 1994 album with John Corabi replacing Vince Neil was at least a decent attempt to roll with the times and go for a more alt-rock sound, it failed to sell, Neil returned to replace Corabi and quality control well and truly went south. 

I very nearly gave this slot to Crue's dreadful 1997 effort Generation Swine but after considering things, I actually think this album is worse. Let's be honest, in the wake of The Dirt, Motley Crue didn't really need to make albums anymore - it gained them a whole new generation of fans to whom they could have happily just done a greatest hits tour every year or two to keep the pension pots topped up. But for reasons best known to themselves, they decided to go down the new material route with 2008's Saints Of Los Angeles and it was pretty much the dictionary definition of phoning an album in packing lazy cliché after lazy cliché (Down At The Whiskey, Mutherfucker Of The Year, Face Down In The Dirt) with the band going through the motions and desperately trying to retread the party rock they made their name with twenty plus years before while desperately trying to pretend that it wasn't the sound of four millionaires in their fifties making it in between trips to the golf course. Unsurprisingly, it would be the group's final effort before they told us they were definitely disbanding for good in 2016. Only to reform in 2019. Yeah, was anyone really surprised by that?...


18. HOUSE OF PAIN - "Same As It Ever Was" (1994)

I hate using the phrase "guilty pleasure" when it comes to music but House of Pain's self-titled debut album definitely falls into that category for me. There was something about the sheer knuckleheaded joie de vivre of Jump Around to make it almost impossible to dislike. Even allowing for the somewhat cringy Noo Yoik Irish schtick of a lot of the songs (a rap Dropkick Murphys if you will?), there was a sheer energy to that album that made it surprisingly enjoyable.

With Same As It Ever Was though, the group sounded as if they had well and truly run out of ideas with the mix of flat beats and unlikeable fratboy machismo ("Scream out my name, Mr Pain's in the house/I'll bust a nut in your gut and leave a stain in your blouse" - yeah, cheers for that fellas) combining to make something genuinely unpleasant. If anything it's a grim foretelling of the nu-metal shitstorm which would land a few years later (the fact that HOP's DJ Lethal would subsequently end up in Limp Bizkit is telling). My main memory of this album is that I picked it up second hand from the Polar Bear indie record shop in Leeds for a fiver about a year after it came out as part exchange for some CD's I was offloading and I thought it was so bad that I literally took it back to the shop the next weekend upon which I was given £1.50 for it. Which really tells you everything.


17. DISCHARGE - "Grave New World" (1986)


Let's not beat about the bush here, Stoke on Trent's Discharge were a hell of an influential band - their 1982 debut album Hear Nothing See Nothing Say Nothing is one of the most brutally savage slices of hardcore punk you will ever hear and is rightly lauded by everyone from Metallica to Rancid. That thunderous drum-beat known as D-beat that the heaviest hardcore bands use? Discharge are the band it's named after. Even as someone who generally drifts towards the more tuneful end of music, I can appreciate this sort of thing when it's done well and make no mistake, Hear Nothing... definitely was.

So what in the name of all that is good possessed them to put this stinking turd out as a follow-up? Possibly having had their heads turned by Metallica namechecking them, the group decided to go thrash metal for their follow-up which maybe wasn't such a big leap but when you suddenly get vocalist Cal Morris ditching his guttural growl of a voice for something that sounds like Vince Neil after swallowing a helium balloon, you've got major issues. It's not that the massive 180 change of sound with much longer songs and more metal arrangements is the problem here, it's the fact that it's done so badly with the fifteen minute closing track The Downward Spiral being an absolute trial to listen to, about as much fun as root canal surgery. The band's fans thought so too and when they went to tour it in the States they frequently found themselves getting bottled off at gigs by the mohawk contingent. Discharge split soon afterwards and it's maybe not a surprise that when they reformed in the '90s, they would return to their signature sound leaving Grave New World to be quietly brushed under the carpet and never mentioned again.


16. CRAZY TOWN - "The Gift Of Game" (1999)

As I mentioned in the Bloodhound Gang entry earlier in this list, the whole nu-metal/fratpunk era really did throw up some dire bands but Crazy Town were the sound of the barrel well and truly being scraped. Similar to the aforementioned dopes, they were a rap band who quickly realised that by adding some guitars they could quickly coast on the whole nu-metal bandwagon and duly gained a Top 5 hit with the Chilis sampling Butterfly (including the "erm yeah, you didn't really think this through did you lads?" line "Me and you babe we're like Sid and Nancy" - I mean lord knows why you would want to compare you and your girl's relationship to that of a couple of smack-addled psychos who both ended up dead at the end of it but hey ho).

An album duly followed and ooh, it was terrible. I should know because I got sent this bugger to review by the student music fanzine I worked for at Keele at the time - I can only assume I must have done something to seriously piss my editor off that month. Basically, take the whole unpleasant knuckleheaded rap schtick of House of Pain's second album (see above) and add some brickbat guitars by numbers to it and bob's yer uncle. Thankfully, like a lot of bands of this era they would rapidly divebomb into obscurity following one more minor hit in the brain-numbingly misogynist Revolving Door. Crazy Town? That kids' TV show Lazy Town had more punk energy and better tunes than these tossers did.


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Don't worry folks, we're getting near the end now. Next five to follow tomorrow...

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