12 Ungodly Awful Albums By Otherwise Awesome Artists

It happens to everyone.  You stick with your favorite artist for long enough, and eventually they will reward your ceaseless dedication by releasing an album so criminally terrible that you actually begin to question your own taste.  Have they sucked this bad all along and you just didn’t want to believe it?  It can be a real blow to your self esteem.  Here are 12 albums that shook fans of some of the greatest artists ever to their very core.

12. Guns N’ Roses – The Spaghetti Incident?

The Spaghetti Incident? is so undeniably shitty that even the spaghetti on the cover looks like it sucks.  It’s hard to fuck up spaghetti.  And for a band as talented as GNR, it should have been pretty difficult to fuck up a covers album.  But they pulled it off with breathtaking ease.

Fans of the band’s earlier work were baffled to hear the boys from L.A. tearing into a series of punk tribute songs.  It would have been one thing if they changed up the arrangements to add some sense of ownership to the songs, but they didn’t.  Most of the arrangements were straight ahead copies of the original songs.  For a band that had built their reputation on over the top ambitiousness, this just seemed lazy.  The timing of the release didn’t help much either.  A punk covers album released in the midst of Nirvana’s take over of the rock world?  Nothing suspicious about that!  And for the record, yes, Chinese Democracy is a far shittier album.  But really, who the hell considers that an actual GNR album?

11. Bruce Springsteen – Human Touch

No matter who you are, releasing two albums on the same day is rarely a good idea.  In the normal best case scenario, what you get is two albums that, if pared down to their best songs, would equal one pretty great record.  But when Bruce Springsteen decided to release Lucky Town and Human Touch on the same day what the world got was one decent album, Lucky Town, and one huge pile of terrible that just happened to have a great title track, Human Touch.

It doesn’t take long for things to tumble downhill pretty rapidly once the fairly excellent title track ends.  The pansy ass flute riffs that open up the second track, “Soul Driver,” let you know immediately that The Boss is entering previously uncharted territory.  He’s making a Sting record.  For fans used to hearing Bruce crank out every man anthems about shitty jobs and cars that won’t start, an offer to drive their soul was the last thing they were expecting.  That is, until they heard the disco funk bass line that kicked off “57 Channels,” a song that finds Bruce rambling some kind of social commentary that I think has to do with having nothing to watch on TV.  Meanwhile, some asshole plays a Casio keyboard and occasionally hits the high hat button for dramatic effect.  And it just gets worse from there.

10. The Velvet Underground – Squeeze

How bad is this album?  It’s not even included in the Peel Slowly and See boxed set, which was basically every album the Velvet Underground ever recorded plus a bunch of rare songs.  But this shit burger of epic proportions was left out.  Rolling Stone writer David Fricke went so far as to refer to Squeeze as “an embarassment to the VU discography.”  And it is.

It’s bad enough that Lou Reed had already left the band by this point, but prior to the recording of Squeeze, every other remaining member was sent packing also with the exception of Doug Yule.  Yule himself wasn’t even an original member, he replaced John Cale, the original bassist.  So what we have here is basically the equivalent of Jason Newsted recording a solo album and putting it out under the name “Metallica.”  You know what’s wrong with that concept?  Everything.

9. The Clash – Cut the Crap

Some albums are so terrible that everyone involved with them tries to act as if they don’t even exist.  In the Clash documentary Westway to the World, the band’s final album doesn’t get so much as a mention from anyone involved.  But it exists.  We’ve heard it.  And it’s fucking dreadful. 

Cut the Crap is the only album recorded after the departure of founding members Mick Jones and Topper Headon.  Topper Headon was the drummer.  Cut the Crap has a goddamned drum machine on it.  A drum machine.  On a Clash record.  Hilariously, the album features a song called “We Are the Clash.”  This was actually as far from being the Clash as one band could possibly get.

8. Van Halen – Van Halen III

After Sammy Hagar quit or got fired or whatever the hell happened to that frizzy headed douche, Van Halen was left searching for a new lead singer.  Inconceivably, they settled on former Extreme frontman Gary Cherone.  When I say “Extreme frontman” I don’t mean he was the kind of lead singer who did scissor kicks and awesome snowboard tricks and shit.  I mean Extreme as in the band that recorded that sappy “More Than Words” song that you probably know from countless Monster Ballads commercials.  Not surprisingly, the public wasn’t really into it.  According to the eleven people who have heard it, the album is pretty atrocious.  And speaking of bands pretending an album doesn’t exist, the discography included with the liner notes to Van Halen’s Best of Both Worlds album doesn’t even list Van Halen III.  That’s pretty harsh.

7. John Fogerty – Eye of the Zombie

As a general rule, pretty much anything with “John Fogerty” or “zombie” in the title is at least kind of awesome.  That’s just one of the things that makes the fact that this album blows so very hard so disappointing.  Seriously, look at that album cover!  It’s not even a zombie!  That’s, like, a werewolf or something.

Coming on the heels of Fogerty’s classic comeback album Centerfield, expectations were high for Eye of the Zombie.  With the triumph of that previous album, it seemed like Fogerty was finally back to form after years of relative inactivity.  Centerfield featured some of his best solo work ever and hearkened back to the sound that made him famous during the CCR days.  Inexplicably, …Zombie featured John Fogerty’s first and, thankfully, last forays into Prince style 80′s funk.  Yeah, you read that correctly.  After this debacle, Fogerty went right back into musical seclusion.  He wouldn’t release another album until 1997, a full nine years later.

6. Prince – Emancipation

At the time of its release, Prince claimed that Emancipation was “the album he was born to make.”  If that’s true, then Prince was born to make terrible music.  After a lengthy legal battle with his record label, which led to the famous name change, Prince was free to release Emancipation on his own terms with absolutely no record label intervention.  What that meant was he was now free to unleash three solid discs worth of subpar material and R&B cliche of the day dabblings on an unsuspecting public.

At the time, the album received generally favorable reviews, but no other Prince album has aged as poorly as Emancipation.  Shit like “We Gets Up” may have sounded downright awesome back then.  Now, it sounds like a hilarious outtake from the Space Jam soundtrack.  Oh, and the rap songs.  Oh dear, the rap songs.  Try as he might, Prince has never been a particularly skilled rapper.  But his lyrical retardedness reached dizzying new heights with “Face Down,” a song about his desire to see his former record label bosses, um, laying face down.  Seriously, it’s horrifying.  Had it been pared down to one album, it was very possible that this would have been a great Prince album.  But it wasn’t, so it’s not.

5. The Who – Face Dances

Some bands just don’t know when to call it quits.  After the untimely death of drummer Keith Moon, The Who regrouped with former Faces drummer Kenney Jones to record Face Dances.  Keeping on without the services of Keith Moon, possibly the most irreplaceable drummer not named John Bonham of all time was a curious enough decision.  But surprisingly, it wasn’t the oddest choice the band made.

In an effort to introduce a new sound along with the new lineup, the band brought in a new producer, Bill Szymczyk.  Szymczyk was best known for his work with The Eagles, and it showed on Face Dances.  Most of the album, excluding the unspeakably awesome opening track “You Better You Bet,” sounds less like The Who and more like new wave pop.  That’s not a good look for The Who.  In the face of the Face Dances debacle, The Who did the only proper thing and disbanded, never to record under the Who name again.  Ha!  Just joking, they’ve been dragging The Who name through the mud ever since.

4. David Bowie – Tonight

According to one Amazon.com reviewer, “Don’t Look Down” from David Bowie’s Tonight album is “an excellent display of white boy reggae.”  If that doesn’t tell you all you need to know about what kind of horror is afoot here, then nothing will.

1983′s Let’s Dance was an unexpected hit album that provided a bit of a career resurgence for Bowie.  1984′s Tonight was Bowie’s desperate attempt to strike while the iron was hot.  Everything about this album just seemed lazy and horrible.  Five of the songs are covers or re-recordings of songs previously written with Iggy Pop.  His reworking of Iggy’s “Neighborhood Threat” into some kind of 80′s synth rock cheese fest is downright disheartening.  Bringing in Tina Turner to help shit on the good name of Iggy Pop’s “Tonight” is a crime against music that should be punishable by, well, being forced to listen to his cover of The Beach Boys “God Only Knows,” which is also on this turd of an album.  Even the relatively awesome “Loving the Alien” overstays its welcome by being something like 75 minutes long.  Ziggy just couldn’t do shit right on this album.

3. Neil Young – Trans

If you started making music in the 60′s or 70′s, there’s a pretty decent chance that the 80′s were a hard decade for you.  This was particularly true for Neil Young, whose 80′s output was so abhorrent David Geffen sued him for, well, not sounding like Neil Young.  There are plenty of awful albums in the Neil Young 80′s discography to choose from.  Old Ways, his attempt at old school country, was the cheesiest thing ever.  Life and Landing On Water were just all around horrible.  But when it comes to shitty Neil Young albums, nothing comes even close to Trans.

The album starts off normally enough with “Little Thing Called Love”, a country-rock tune that would lead one to believe that this album had some promise.  Then shit like this starts happening…

Yep, that was Neil Young singing through a voice box over fruity Europop synth riffs.  The album is absolutely riddled with shit like this.  Other than the re-working of his 60′s classic “Mr. Soul” its all pretty terrifying in its awfulness.  With that said, if you’re not absolutely intrigued to hear the entire album, we’d be shocked.  For good reason, it’s pretty hard to find in North America.  Unless you know how to use the internet, of course.

2. KISS – Carnival of Souls

Let’s just get it out of the way, we understand that calling KISS awesome is a shaky premise at best.  But they certainly have their legion of fans, so they make the list.  Besides, we weren’t going to pass on the chance to make fun of the misguided mess that is Carnival of Souls.

Hair metal bands, which is totally what KISS were by the late eighties, all responded in different ways to the grunge phenomenon that effectively destroyed hair metal.  Some bands disappeared completely.  Some finally took a well needed break to perfect the art of drug abuse and abject depression.  Some bands kept on performing and recording, albeit with a highly diminished fan base.  KISS did none of this.  Instead, they decided to record a grunge album and release it in 1997 when grunge was in the final throes of death.  The results were nothing short of embarrassing.

It’s not that the music itself is all that horrible.  Had it been released by a different band maybe four years earlier, it probably would have been huge.  But coming from the band most well known for rocking and rolling all night and partying every day, hearing songs with titles like “Hate,” “Childhood’s End,” and “Master and Slave” just reeked of desperation.  Probably because this was some truly desperate shit.  Alice In Chains and Soundgarden never even tried this hard to sound like Alice In Chains and Soundgarden.  To the band’s credit, they did scrap the album when the original lineup reunited.  It was supposed to be released in late 1995 or early 1996.  But thanks to rampant bootlegging, they decided to let it see the light of day in 1997.  Some things are just best not cashed in on.  Thankfully, with 1998′s Psycho Circus, KISS was back to sucking in their own unique way.

1. Metallica – St. Anger

As Dave Chappelle once stated in a famous skit, sometimes, keeping it real can go wrong.  St. Anger was supposed to be Metallica’s return to their early days of rocking your goddamned face off.  After the double headed disappointment that was Load and Re-Load, it should have been good thing.  It wasn’t.  In the name of keeping things “raw” the band decided to not master any of the recordings.  The result of that decision was a sonic mess.  Lars’ drums still sounded metal, but metal meaning “Caribbean steel drums” as opposed to Master of Puppets.  Also, no guitar solos.  On a Metallica record.  A Metallica record with no guitar solos is like Flavor Flav with no clock.  It’s just not acceptable.

And the lyrics.  Holy shit, those lyrics.  “My lifestyle, determines my deathstyle.”  Really?  We’re all for sobriety as long as we don’t have to stop drinking or hear a washed up metal guy whine about it.  In addition to spawning the most horrid Metallica album ever, the St. Anger sessions also resulted in the documentary film Some Kind of Monster.  Overnight, the man who once spoke of not being able to take the stage without doing a shot of Jagermeister while standing barefoot in mud was suddenly getting life coaching from a dude in a Cosby Show sweater.  Shit was tragic.

So that’s the list. We know, there are plenty that we left out. Feel free to head to the comments section below to kindly state your case for other shitty albums or, more likely, to tell us we fail at life for not including Dirty Work by The Rolling Stones or something.