The Horror! Nite Songs' Worst Albums Ever Part 3 (30-21)

PREVIOUSLY IN THIS COLUMN: Intro • Part 1 (50-41) • Part 2 (40-31)

And so we enter Nite Songs' Top 30 worst albums ever. From veteran rockers losing the plot to bands who arguably never had said plot in the first place, it's a truly grim selection of musical atrociousness we've got for you today. Shall we begin?...

30. SUEDE - "A New Morning" (2001)

Probably one of the most disappointing swansong albums of the post-Britpop era. We've already covered Suede in the Garbage Days Revisited section of this blog and I was a huge fan of theirs growing up. Unfortunately, A New Morning was the sound of a band who had pretty much run out of road and it wasn't a big surprise that it turned out to be their last release for a decade.

Following Brett Anderson's decision to get clean following his drugs issues during the recording of the band's previous effort Head Music, Suede were promising that their next album would see them moving into more upbeat waters. Unfortunately, the comeback single Positivity was a truly weak effort, completely lacking any sort of punch and it would prove to be a grim foretelling of what was to come. Suede had at times sounded a little bit aimless on both Coming Up and Head Music but never had they sounded so lifeless as they did here with A New Morning veering between limp and cloying jangle-indie (Lonely Girls) and pale imitations to recreate the glory days which fell well short (Beautiful Loser). Of course, the band would reunite a decade or so later and the fact that they've managed to put out three pretty damn good albums since then really marks out what an aberration in their back catalogue this album is.

29. THE BLACK CROWES - "Amorica" (1994)

Okay, you know where that whole ultra-tedious retro-raiding of the rock vault, that whole loathsome Classic Rock Luddite faction started? Probably here. Bizarrely, there was a time right at the beginning where I used to quite like the Black Crowes - their debut album Shake Your Moneymaker had at least one absolute stormer on it in the form of opener Twice As Hard and their cover of Otis Redding's Hard To Handle was surprisingly competent. Even their second album The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion had the odd moment even if the warning signs as to what would follow were very much there.

By the time of their third album though, the group were hopelessly lost in a hazed-up fog, seemingly convinced that being the next Grateful Dead was something to aim for and Amorica is an absolute drudge to listen to, clocking in at nearly an hour of half-arsed ideas, lyrics which sound as if they were written on the back of a Rizla packet and a whole air of smug self-satisfied lethargy about the whole thing. In an era where Oasis, Blur and Pulp were leading the Britpop charge across the Atlantic, is it any wonder that the US rock scene had little or no impact in the UK at this point if this is the best they had to offer?

28. BABYLON ZOO - "King Kong Groover" (1998)

Ahh, poor old Babylon Zoo. Forever cursed to be remembered as a one hit wonder where the hit in question's main selling point was its cool speeded-up techno first 30 seconds (Spaceman in case you were living in a cave in 1996) before it sunk into plodding stadium indie rock, they were always gonna struggle once the initial interest had worn off. A Top 10 album (The Boy With The X-Ray Eyes) and two singles with slowly worsening chart positions (Animal Army stopped just inside the Top 20 and the album's title track stopped just outside the Top 30) and that should, by rights, have been that.

So imagine my surprise in late 1998 while working at KUBE radio when I received the promo for the first single from a forthcoming second Babylon Zoo album called, wait for it, All The Money's Gone. I gave it a curiosity play on my show that evening and oh lord, it was awful - it sounded like post-shark jump Oasis covering Robbie Williams' Old Before I Die. Unsurprisingly it missed the Top 40 altogether and the album, King Kong Groover (I mean, Christ...) somehow managed to be even worse than the debut with the likes of Manhattan Martian, Hey Man and Chrome Invader being an utter mess with singer Jas Mann seemingly unable to decide if he wanted to be John Lennon, Liam Gallagher or Ziggy Stardust. Actually, mostly a really bad Ziggy Stardust. Literally the only redeeming feature is a cover of Mott the Hoople's Honaloochie Boogie which isn't great but is at least better than Great White and Adam Bomb's truly hideous covers of Once Bitten Twice Shy and All The Young Dudes respectively in the "bad Ian Hunter covers" league. Well, you've got to take the small victories I s'pose...

27. KULA SHAKER - "Peasants, Pigs & Astronauts" (1999)

Similar to Babylon Zoo above, we're back in "second album by a band who really should have called it a day after the first" territory here. I was originally going to give this slot to Kula Shaker's debut album K which was released into the Britpop explosion and was arguably the beginning of the end of the movement - four trustafarians trying to do a tenth rate George Harrison impersonation and writing songs in Sanskrit despite the fact that they couldn't have been more white upper-middle-class if they'd tried. Eeesh, it was painful.

But then I was having a chat with someone about it and they mentioned that if I thought K was bad then I should listen to the follow-up. And they were right - Peasants, Pigs And Astronauts is far worse. Think all the bad stuff about the first one crossed with a Darkness-style second album situation where the band were basically given a free reign to chuck anything they fancied into the pot because their previous album had done so well. Bagpipes? Check. More Sanskrit songs for posh backpackers to listen to on that gap year in the Himalayas? Check. Ridiculous lyrics about wizards in blizzards (Mystical Machine Gun)? Check. It really is terrible.

In Kula Shaker's defence, I remember talking to someone during my time in London who'd met Crispian Mills and apparently he is a genuinely nice bloke who, similar to Pete Doherty and Sam Preston, is happy to acknowledge that he may have been a bit of a divot back when Kula Shaker were in their late '90s pomp. The band reformed in the noughties and are still going today but suffice to say, I generally haven't had the inclination to check out any of their more recent stuff.

26. UGLY KID JOE - "Motel California" (1996)

The lead-off single from this third Ugly Kid Joe album was called Sandwich (I shall refrain from making the obvious Spinal Tap joke here) which includes the immortal opening line "She was a good witch, she was a bad witch, but all I really wanted was a muthafuckin' sandwich". Terrifyingly, that's probably the best thing about this album. Ugly Kid Joe were a bunch of late in the day scuzz goofballs who got their break in the wake of their Everything About You song becoming a Top 5 hit on the back of appearing on the Wayne's World soundtrack. As much fun as it was at the time, it really hasn't aged well and their second and final hit, a surprisingly straight cover of Cats In The Cradle, kind of marked them as a band who were trend-chasing a bit.

By the time of Motel California, it was pretty much all over bar the shouting (the band would split soon after its release) and oh boy it shows - this is a lousy collection of rap-metal (think a total bonehead version of Rage Against The Machine), sub-Green Day pop-punk and limp Chilis style funk metal which well and truly tanked. There were a lot of terrible examples in the mid-'90s of one time hair rock/sleaze bands trying to "move with the times" by embracing grunge, thrash, rap-metal etc but Motel California must be up there as one of the worst.

25. GRETA VAN FLEET - "Anthem Of The Peaceful Army" (2018)

Greta Van Fleet hold the unwanted record of receiving the lowest review score to date in Nite Songs with their Battle At Garden's Gate album (click here if you must) but arguably its predecessor was even worse. As I mentioned in that review, it's not that GVF are a spectacularly unoriginal band who only seem capable of xeroxing Led Zeppelin B-sides, it's the fact that they do it so badly that's the issue.

I mean honestly, you could find any Led Zep covers band in your local pub who can do more proficient stuff than GVF - singer Josh apes Robert Plant's howl with hardly any of the conviction or soul while guitarist Jake can certainly widdle up and down his fretboard but is way way short of being Jimmy Page. And when you add to that the laughably bad lyrics on the likes of Cold Wind and the downright creepy New Day (which appears to be about waiting for a 13-year-old girl to hit legal age so you can have sex with her - I mean ewwwwww) which sound like the Darkness minus the sense of humour, the picture is depressingly complete. They remain the most backward-looking of musical amateur thieves, half-heartedly filching ideas and then trying replicate the results with minimal skill and showing an almost total lack of understanding of what it actually is that they're copying. How they're still getting away with it is frankly beyond me but I guess the best we can hope is that some day they come to their musical senses and try incorporating an actual original idea or two into their music.

24. BUSH - "Razorblade Suitcase" (1997)

Despite my long-standing dislike of grunge, I can appreciate why it had to happen and, at least originally, I'll concede that there were a few good albums mixed in with the dross - Nirvana's Bleach, the Smashing Pumpkins' Siamese Dream, Soul Asylum's Hang Time etc. The trouble is that the instant Smells Like Teen Spirit took Cobain and co into megastardom, every label was falling over themselves to sign their own version and from this, we got the blustery bellowing of Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, post-shark jump Soul Asylum etc etc.

By 1997, the movement was well and truly sunk but there were still a few stragglers breaking through. Case in point - London grungers Bush who'd initially made absolutely no impact with their 16 Stone debut album only to see it shift tons of units Stateside. Inevitably this led to their second album Razorblade Suitcase actually becoming a hit over here but good lord, it was wretched - plodding joyless angst-rock which was reheating the corpse of a genre which had died on its arse a good 2-3 years before. Ironically, their follow-up The Science Of Things actually wasn't too bad as it saw them breaking away from their Nirvana-lite security blanket and even going into slightly post-punk territory in places but the damage had been done by then.

23. RICHARD ASHCROFT - "Alone With Everybody" (2000)

This may surprise you dear reader but before they descended into string-heavy AOR drudgery, I used to quite like the Verve. Their first album A Storm In Heaven remains one of the better shoegazing ones with the sheer heaviness of the riffs on the likes of Star Sail and Slide Away elevating it well above the likes of Thousand Yard Stare, Chapterhouse et al. Even A Northern Soul which was losing fire a bit with a few leaden slowies still had the defiance of This Is Music to keep it afloat. However, shortly afterwards they split only to reform in 1997 with the boring ballad-heavy Urban Hymns which saw them finally achieve proper chart success but also lose everything that had made them interesting in the first place. It created its fair share of internal tension in the band and they would split the following year.

I was very tempted to put Urban Hymns on this list as I still can't stand its mawkish navel-gazing but then I realised there was a far worse offender which was Verve singer Richard Ashcroft's first solo album, essentially Urban Hymns part 2 only even more commercialised - lead off single A Song For The Lovers sounded like The Road To Hell by Chris Rea ferfuxxake. With its inane lyrics and chronic over-production, it felt like music for yuppies to play at dinner parties with Ashcroft warbling "I've got money to burn and I wanna burn it on you" like some great wine bar dwelling bore. When you consider that this was the man who just seven years earlier had co-written the soaring She's A Superstar and the hypnotic All In The Mind, it really did feel slightly tragic.

22. THE BLOODHOUND GANG - "Hooray For Boobies" (1999)

Urgh, frat-punk really did throw up some horrible bands, didn't it? There were a good few who were in serious contention for this spot - Alien Ant Farm's ANThology, Blink 182's Enema Of The State, Simple Plan, Sum 41. However, thanks to a memory triggered when writing the recent King Adora SFTJ article, I remembered this lot. The Bloodhound Gang were a rap metal group from Pennsylvania who hitched a ride on the frat-punk bandwagon with their rock disco staple The Bad Touch which was really more akin to an utterly knuckleheaded New Order or Depeche Mode than anything that actually properly rocked but which, to be fair, sounded quite funny after a few pints.

The trouble is though, as anyone who's ever heard Steel Panther or Goldie Lookin' Chain will testify, it's very difficult to stretch one joke across a full album especially when you've got a band who seem to deliberately be going out of their way to make themselves unlikeable (if it was irony then fair play they well and truly excelled at it but I somehow have my doubts). From the "Justin Hawkins meets Beavis and Butthead" title downwards, Hooray For Boobies was a collision of forgettable tunes, unfunny jokes and tedious attempts at being "controversial". Thankfully, one further Top 20 hit in the lunkheaded Ballad Of Chasey Lain (which appears to be about taking a porn star home to meet your mum and dad and asking her to get her tits oot - yeah, real funny guys) and the Bloodhound Gang were mercifully on the fast track back to obscurity...

21. TOWERS OF LONDON - "Fizzy Pop" (2008)

If Towers of London had unexpectedly split after their first two or three singles then I’m pretty sure we’d still be talking in hushed tones about them now. In a world of "oh look we're so ironic" punchable tossers like the Fratellis, Scouting For Girls, the Pigeon Detectives et al, they offered a lean and mean nastiness to the indie scene with the ferocious likes of On A Noose and the all time classic Fuck It Up winning them plaudits in the indie and rock press alike. Unfortunately when their album Blood, Sweat and Towers surfaced, it was a disappointment, the sound of a band with four or five killer tunes and a lot of filler.

Then lead singer Donny Tourette went on Celebrity Big Brother. And, as you'll know from reading the Ordinary Boys entry earlier in this here list, CBB = instant career suicide for guitar bands. Despite swaggering in like he was the reincarnation of Sid Vicious, Donny basically did a runner over the fence after being asked to massage Jade Goody's feet on the third day or so which probably tells you everything. The group failed to achieve any sort of chart bounce from the episode with their next single I'm A Rat stalling outside the Top 40 and guitarist Rev and drummer Snell (the two cool ones in the band) would quickly leave after becoming tired of Donny and Dirk Tourette's antics overshadowing the band's music. Donny then compounded things by going on Never Mind The Buzzcocks and making an even bigger tit of himself than Preston did after foolishly trying to pick an argument with Bill Bailey and getting his arse well and truly handed to him on a plate verbally (Bailey's phrase "You're about as punk as Enya!" had me in stitches when I watched it at the time)

Fizzy Pop was the final nail in the coffin, released a couple of years later and proving that TOL had well and truly run out of road. With Rev and Snell gone, the tunes were well south of abysmal - lead single Naked On The Dancefloor seemed atrocious when you first heard it with its generic riffing and dreadful lyrics...until you realised that the rest of the album was even worse. Sure enough, it missed the charts by a mile and soon the band were no more.

There's a sad/hilarious (delete according to your point of view) epilogue to this story - about six months after the album came out, I remember walking around the big CD clearance store in Leeds which had previously been a Zavvi/Virgin. At the end of one of the aisles there was a big pile of copies of Fizzy Pop with a neon sticker on the side bearing the rather tragic sharpie’d logo "Only 75p - please buy me!" Which is probably a fitting epitaph for Towers of London...

(Quick footnote - the group did reform about 3 years ago when I saw them supporting the Wildhearts on the Renaissance Men tour with Donny now looking uncannily like Dennis Waterman in his Minder years. To be fair he put up a few interviews on Youtube at the time where, similar to a few others in this list, he came across as a decent enough bloke who was more than a little bit embarrassed by his younger self’s behaviour back then. But it still doesn’t stop this being a terrible album)

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Yeesh. And breathe folks, we’re at the end of part 3. We’ll give you a day to rest up and use some ear and eye bleach to help erase these horrors and be back with part 4 tomorrow as we tread trepidatiously into the Top 20…