Every band has them- curious experiments that seemed right at the time but simply are wrong. Any band worth their salt has tried to do something different and instead of creating art they've made fools of themselves in the process. of course what happens then is 20 years later their fans will hail it as the best thing they ever did, while the band themselves denounce it. Some albums spring straight to mind. I am wondering what you guys consider to be the worst albums by your favourite artists.
By worst, I don't necessarily mean that you hate it, but rather that you could live without it if you weren't such a completist about these things.
Here are some of mine-

Kiss- "Animalize"
Well first mistake was getting Mark St. John and his mosquito fingers to stuff up this album. "Heaven's On Fire" is pretty good, but the rest of the album is pretty rank. Not too many Kiss fans would disagree. Yes I know "Music from the Elder" is considered even worse, but I quite enjoy it, always have, and it's far more musically interesting than ANYTHING on "Animalize"

ELO- "Balance Of Power". A group that really was way past it's use by date by this time. Benn has made points about a couple numbers on this album, but at the end of the day it's very ordinary, and certainly not ELO. I would listen to "Zoom" anyday.

Elton John- "The Big Picture". Surprisingly, this is his first absolute stinker of an album- and it came out some 27 years after his first. There is no heart or soul in this. Too many bought it without checking the tracklisting for the new "Candle In The Wind". No folks, it ain't here. What is here is eminently forgettable. Even Elton dismisses this effort now. "Songs From The West Coast" is infinately better.

Over to you....

Just some random musings here:

"The Spaghetti Incident?" - Guns N' Roses

I don't care if Axl and the gang were paying tribute to their influences, this was a very misguided and boring album. There really isn't anything memorable on it. It's a shame that this was to be the Gunners' last studio recording.

DiVinyls - the DiVinyls

Christine Amphlett and Mark McEntee opt for a totally pop sound. While there are a couple of good songs on this disc - "If Love Was a Gun" and "Bullet" - the rest of the disc is pretty average. Even taking into consideration the big hit "I Touch Myself". And even the two songs I like are more pop than the punk/metal sound the DiVinyls started out with.

Doo Bop - Miles Davis

I love Miles. I worship the man. He is the best jazz trumpeter of all time, IMNSHO. But this... With this album, the restless soul of the Prince of Darkness chose to experiment with combining rap with jazz. Nothing wrong with that. Us3 and Digable Planets proved it could be done and done well. (Just listen to Us3's fantastic "Cantaloop [Flip Fantasia]" for proof.) But this - Miles' final album - was not a good example of it. I get the impression that Miles did not truly undestand rap/hip hop, thus he fumbled the experiment badly. It's a shame, 'cos the Master (as I call him) was such a great innovator.

Brigade - Heart

By this point, Ann and Nancy Wilson had enjoyed success with such AOR hits as "What About Love" and "Alone". Pity. They were better when they were producing headbanging hard rock. The only thing Brigade had going for it was the song, "All I Wanna Is Make Love To You". And I've never liked that song. I rarely play this record, I find it so boring.

New Adventures In Hi-Fi and Up - R.E.M.

The former album was recorded while the band was on tour. It shows. The album is unfocused and the songs could have used some workshopping to strengthen them. Instead, R.E.M. threw out this half-baked disc onto the public. As for Up, uh, Michael, Mike, Peter, didn't you guys once say that if anyone quit the band, that was it? R.E.M. would break up? So, now that Bill Berry's left the band, why do we have this album?

The Traveling Wilburys 3 - the Traveling Wilburys

The first record by this "fictional" band of brothers - Jeff Lynne, George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty and Roy Orbison - was not only a surprising hit, but a damned great album. Those five guys were clearly having fun. But first of all, the second album, Wilbury 3, proves just how essential the late Roy Orbison was to the project. His angelic voice was the perfect counterpart to the other four's voices. Worse, the second album lacked the fun, the spark, the spontaneity of the first album.

Rattle and Hum - U2

After creating their masterpiece, The Joshua Tree, U2 "discovered" the Blues. The results are, well, maybe not disastrous, but it sounds fake. Even when the great B.B. King joins them for "When Love Comes to Town". The album is uneven.

Filth Pig - Ministry

The Land of Rape and Honey, A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Taste and of course, Psalm 69, Ministry's three best albums, were blueprints for industrial goth metal. Those records are fierce, angry and scary to listen to. Then in order to follow up the brilliant Psalm 69, Al Jourgeson and the band created Filth Pig, a dance album that hasn't got a groove to it at all. The best thing on it is their warped version of Bob Dylan's "Lay Lady, Lay".

ReLoad - Metallica

Load was okay. But this was redundant. Of Metallica has been going downhill since the song "Nothing Else Matters" proved to be such a big hit. Since then, Lars Ulrich has said the band wants to be known as "Rocktallica". Have at it boys.

Changes - the Monkees

Micky Dolenz and Davy Jones. An album by the actors of the Pre-Fab Four. They can't play an istrument. Can't really write songs ("Randy Scouse Git" notwithstanding) and apparently can't pick good material to record. This was a joke.

Around the World In a Day - Prince and the Revolution

After the runaway success of Purple Rain and 1999, I suspect the Purple One freaked out and decided to create a less commercial and powerful album. The result was this album. It just wasn't as awe-inspiring as his better, earlier efforts. From this point on, Prince's albums would generally be weak and inconsistent.

np - The Real Thing - Faith No More

"It's all one song." - Neil Young

Queen, Hot Space.

Absolutely agree with "The Spaghetti Incident" and "Hot Space". Interestingly, Queen would follow that one with two of their finest albums ever- "The Works" and "A Kind Of Magic".

Thought of another one as well-

Deep Purple- "Slaves and Masters". This is what happens when Ritchie Blackmore does the hiring and firing. Out went Ian Gillan (arguably THE voice of DP) and replaced it with Joe Lynn Turner (basically, lead singer of Blackmore's Rainbow when Ronnie James Dio quit). The album is trashy, dated and nowhere near their best. And if I was thinking along live albums as well, I wouldn't look much further than "Last Concert In Japan" which is an abomination from start to finish.

Just by coincidence I happened to dust off my copy of Little Feat's Down on the Farm yesterday to see if I could scrounge a song for a mix disc and I'm inclined to suggest that it belongs on this list. Founding member Lowell George died before DotF could be released but it's still an overly glossy soulless affair and it's easy to see why he put the band on hiatus in the first place. 1 or 2 good tracks, though.

>Changes - The Monkees

>Micky Dolenz and Davy Jones. An album by the
>actors of the Pre-Fab Four. They can't play
>an istrument. Can't really write songs ("Randy
>Scouse Git" notwithstanding) and apparently
>can't pick good material to record. This one is
>a joke.

Well, Micky and Davy didn't really write any of the songs on Changes, nearly all of them were written by Jeff Barry and his team. The lone exception, Dolenz's "Midnight Train" had been kicking around since the very early days of the band and was one of three Changes tracks to be an outtake from a session for an earlier album.
This was pretty much an assembly line production, an attempt by the "suits" to return the Monkees to their bubblegum roots, so I don't know how much say Davy and Micky had in the material selection.
Besides, how can you say that Davy and Micky don't play any instruments? The album cover clearly shows Davy shaking the maracas and Micky a tamborine!
Changes isn't all that terrible, though. "Ticket On a Ferry Ride" is quite lovely, and "Do You Feel It Too?" is a neat little stick of bubblegum, but the album is probably best taken in small doses. The best song is probably "99 Pounds", which of course actually shouldn't really count as a Changes song.

>Deep Purple- "Slaves and Masters"

Strongly disagree. Sorry, but I think "Slaves" is the best of all the post-seventies Deep Purple albums, Perpendicular included, regardless of the lineup. Heck, it's a lot better than The Battle Raages On. I've had this argument before with other Purp fans.

And as to "Last Concert in Japan" - the original album was indeed a poor release. But that album has since in recent years been wonderfully remastered and expanded to a full 2-CD set and the resulting product is now one of Purple's greatest live packages.

well, I can't see how rubbish and be remastered into anything more than that. Tommy Bolin was clearly having one of his..er...off nights. Poor Jon Lord's keyboards were cranked up so high it was revolting.

So unless they rerecorded some of it, I fail to see how it could improve...let's face it, if what they left out wasn't worth going on the album, I shudder to hear it given the quality of the stuff that DID make it.

As for "Slaves"...well, that is your opinion of course, and you are more than entitled to it, I will respectfully disagree and leave it at that (except to say that their new album "Bananas" is pretty darn good!!)

Well, Micky and Davy didn't really write any of the songs on Changes, nearly all of them were written by Jeff Barry and his team. - Todd Pence

Which wasn't really my point. My point was that if Micky and Davy were as good of songwriters as Mike and Peter, then the album might not have been so bad.

This was pretty much an assembly line production, an attempt by the "suits" to return the Monkees to their bubblegum roots, so I don't know how much say Davy and Micky had in the material selection. - Todd Pence

Now that's irony! I mean when you consider the battles the group went through to gain artistic control over their albums and then to throw it away on something this half-assed... Lordy. I mean, I know Davy was content to let others (Don Kirshner) choose their material, but surely having experienced the freedom of the last 6 albums, he'd balked at giving it up again. Unless he just didn't care.

Keep in mind, that according to the liner notes of the Rhino Records CD release, Micky and Davy agreed to work on the album, even if it was a contractual obligation. Davy himself dismisses the album. ("That was not an album. It was just Jeff Barry and Andy Kim doing an Andy Kim album. Andy Kim couldn't get it sold, so they took his voice off it, and they put us on it.") I suspect there's more to it than that, though. I suspect that the experience didn't go the way they thought it would.

It does have a couple of halfway decent songs, though: "Oh My My" (the album's only hit) and "Ticket On a Ferry Ride". The rest of it can induce a coma with me.

"It's all one song." - Neil Young

BAD COMPANY: "Fame And Fortune"
This is one project that maybe should have called it quits after the original lineup split.

CROSBY STILLS AND NASH: "Live It Up"
The famed acoustic vocal harmony triad goes . . . synth-pop??!!??

EMERSON LAKE AND PALMER: "Love Beach"
Millions of ELP fans across the world put this one on when it came out, and then could all be heard in unison: "What the hell?"

GENESIS: "Calling All Stations"
This one should go without saying.

KANSAS: "Drastic Measures"
Apt title.

LED ZEPPELIN: "Presence"
How could Zep have made an album so gosh-darn boring?

THE ROLLING STONES: "Undercover Of The Night"
Aside from one pretty good rocker ("She Was Hot"), this record is mostly swill with one song undistinguishable from the other. This is the one Stones album I hardly ever play.

URIAH HEEP: "Equator"
Actually, I like this one a lot more than Different World. But the eighties synth-dominated sound and style makes it the most dated-sounding of all their albums, despite its relative recentness.

YES: "Tormato"
They may not have killed the whale, but they sure jumped the shark with this one.

NEIL YOUNG: The triad of Transformer, Old Ways, and Reactor. Neil experiments with different styles and succeeds in coming up with three eminently forgettable albums.

Just about every rock critic in the world would shout me down for this, but I really don't care for Morrison Hotel by The Doors. "Peace Frog" and "Waiting For The Sun" are great, but the rest (including "Roadhouse Blues") just puts me to sleep.

Benn, I actually quite like New Adventures In Hi-Fi, although I find Monster weaker, and it's nowhere near the late IRS/ early Warners albums (Document to Automatic for the People). As for Up and Reveal, they really should have called it a day when Bill Berry left, although I suppose Warners wouldn't let them, having given them such a massive recording contract (IIRC there's one more album to come on it)

The funny thing is, R.E.M. once swore that if anyone in the band wanted to leave, that'd be it for the group. Well, Bill decided to leave for health reasons, and we still have the Athens band around. Can't trust nobody anymore. If the albums were of better quality it'd be a different matter...

I have yet to buy Reveal, and unless I find it for a dirt cheap price, or hear something off it that sounds really enticing, I don't think I ever will get it.

I have played New Adventures In Hi-Fi since I've made initial post. And I still don't like it that well. To each his own, I guess.

np - Chome, Smoke and BBQ - ZZ Top

"Music is a world within itself and a language we all understand."

Egads! I misspelled "Chrome" in my previous post. We regret the error.

In my opinion, 1993's "Counterparts" by Canadian rock trio Rush is their worst ever album. I myself only liked one, and only one song from it, the cool-sounding rock song "Alien Shore".

But they would bounce back with great rock albums 1996's "Test For Echo" and eventually, 2002's "Vapor Trails".

But I'm not saying that this was a bad thing for the group to have just ONE album that was below their usual standards. I'd rather listen to the worst of Rush than the so-called "best" of mmany other artists and groups any day!

Brigade - Heart

I'll go one step further than you, Benn - Heart jumped the shark after their 1978 record "Dog and Butterfly," with their 1980 "Bebe La Strange." From then on, it was downhill, and fast. I don't understand how a band that produced some superb kick-ass rock at their peak (check out "Straight On" from "D&B") could put out such swill as "Alone," "What About Love" and "Tell It Like It Is." Guess the Wilson sisters just sold out.

I've gotta say, I really like Bebe Le Strange. It's one of my favorite Heart albums. However, I'll agree with you that it was the Wilson Sister's last consistently good album. Private Audition, Passionworks, Heart and Bad Animals all have enough decent songs and tunes I really like (such as "Nothing At All"), that I don't I mind them that much. But Brigade was a complete waste of time to me. There's not anything on it I think is decent or interesting. It's too commercial for me. I haven't bought any Heart albums after released after Brigade.

However, I do see and respect your point about the post-Dog and Butterfly stuff, Adam.

np - March (Specifically the track, "Innocent One") - Michael Penn (Haven't played this CD in a loonnng time.)

Every song is somebody's favorite song.

Heart did one of those let's-get-back-together-and-record-one-song-and-stick-it-on-a-new-greatest-hits-album in 1998. The song was called 'Strong, Strong Wind.' Alas it's just a typical ballad written from the title outward. This being a nitpicking board though, we can discuss the line 'It would take a strong, strong wind to take me away from you.' Basically, this means 'I would never leave you unless it's for someone really, really hot.'

Nice sentiment.

Whoopdy-doo! I just thought of another example!

Def Leppard's "Slang". It was an awful, horrible, terrible, and appalling abomination, especially since it came from one of my absolute favorite British rock groups that are capable of so much better! (See "Pyromania", "Hysteria", & "Adrenalize".)

Anyway, that particular CD has no place being in the same catagory as "Photograph", "Pour Some Sugar On Me", and "Let's Get Rocked", and many other great Lep tunes. I don't have it in my collection, it doesn't exist to me! However the boys from Sheffield would make a huge comeback with the 1999 album "Euphoria", with the hit "Promises", and then later with their tenth album, "X".

Now they have a great covers album called "Yeah!" I highly recommend it! Rock on, Def Leppard!

This post is in regards to Todd Pence's post from 2003:

Personally, I like Paul Rodgers, the original lead singer of Bad Company throughout the '70's and early '80's. But I also like Brian Howe, the new lead singer the band acquired in 1986, starting with the album you mentioned "Fame & Fortune".

And they would go on to release a few more albums with Brian singing lead. 1988's "Dangerous Age", 1990's "Holy Water", and 1992's "Here Comes Trouble". And I like many of the songs from all four of those CD's.

The one thing BC did that I didn't like was the 1993 live album "What You Hear Is What You Get". I mean, Brian singing the BC classics that Paul had made famous in the '70's? Get real!

And after that, Brian left, and the band released two more albums, "Company Of Strangers" and "Stories Told & Untold", but I don't know who sang for those two. And then, Paul would come back to be BC's lead singer again, and they would release a "classic Anthology". I haven't followed them in a while, so I don't know if they have any new stuff coming out.

There. That was me discussing Bad Company. I will now discuss Genesis!

In this case, I agree with you, Todd. I HATED the fact that Phil Collins left the band in 1996 to focus on his solo career, leaving Mike Rutherford and that other guy without a lead singer. The guy they later chose to sing lead for their 1997 comeback, "Calling All Stations", Ray Wilson, did such a bad job that Genesis has not released an album of new material since!

However, Peter Gabriel and Phil Collins BOTH came back to contribute vocals for one song in 1999, a remake of the original "Carpet Crawlers", which was included on the otherwise lousy "Hits" collection from that same year.

Anyway, I suppose that my point is that I prefer the Phil Collins Genesis, but I like both the Paul Rodgers and the Brian Howe Bad Company.

One last thing: Regarding Crosby, Stills & Nash, I really like both "Southern Cross" from the '70's, AND the title track to 1990's "Live It Up". What would you call that? An eclectic taste in music, I suppose!

"Southern Cross" was actually from 1982 - from "Daylight Again", which was a really great CSN album.

I kinda liked American Dream, on which Neil Young came back on board, but everybody else seems to have panned that album mercilessly. It's still a lot better than LIU.