Afleveringen
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Welcome back to Broken Records, the podcast that searches in all the right places to crown the very worst album in the history of music. We’ve got a biggie of a name this week as we look at Born Again, the 11th studio album from the inventors of heavy metal, Black Sabbath, released on the 7th of August 1983.
Sabbath basically dodged a bullet when original vocalist Ozzy Osbourne left the band and they were able to replace him with the equally enigmatic Ronnie James Dio. Dio recorded two albums with Sabbath, with 1980’s Heaven and Hell being considered as good as anything the band had ever put out. But when personal dynamics led to his departure in 1982, Sabbath were once again on the lookout for a new frontman. Enter former Deep Purple vocalist Ian Gillan, a man who was highly influenced by Elvis and used to be in Jesus Christ Superstar, he didn’t quite look the right fit for a doomy, dark and menacing heavy metal band. And so it proved; though Gillan is a fine vocalist, he and the band struggled to gel creatively, and the result is this album, which also features one of the most eyeball abusing front covers in the history of music. To rub salt into the wounds, when the band went out to tour the record they were beset by problems, the main one being a massive Stonehenge stage set that they accidentally erected due to some incorrect measurements. Gillan was soon gone, but he leaves this fascinating album behind him. Question is; is it actually that bad?
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Welcome back to Broken Records, where Steve and Remfry have decided to try and find the very worst album of all time. This week we’re looking at the debut album from UK rock personality Screaming Lord Sutch, Lord Sutch and Heavy Friends, released on the 25th of May 1970.
If you’re of a similar age to us then you might know the name from his various political endeavours back in the 80s and 90s, but Screaming Lord Sutch (not a real Lord) was actually something of a shock rock pioneer back in the early 60’s. He had a hit in 1963 with the song Jack The Ripper and during his live shows he would jump out of a coffin and chuck maggots at the audience...which was nice! But, by 1968 Sutch’s joke had worn thin with the “Great British Public” and he went over to the USA and decided to create his first album with the help of a few friends.
Those friends were Led Zep pair Jimmy Page and John Bonham, Jeff Beck and Noel Redding of The Jimi Hendrix Experience. Good eh! Well… not if you’re any of those guys, because they weren’t sure what they were doing was even going to feature on the album, as session musicians were brought in to finish parts of the album in the style of the big names that featured. It was released and immediately became hated, both by musicians, with Page being particularly vocal about his dismay at the results, and by music fans, being voted the worst album ever by the BBC in 1998. But is it really that bad? Hmmm…
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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Welcome back to another edition of Broken Records, where Steve and Remfry are charged with the unenviable task of finding the worst album ever made. This week we’re looking at Other Voices, the 7th studio album from the LA psychedelic rock band The Doors, released on the 18th of October 1971.
In the aftermath of the release of arguably their finest album, 1971’s LA Woman, The Doors were rocked with the untimely passing of their iconic frontman Jim Morrison. They had already been writing as a three piece without the singer and had composed enough material to make a follow up, assuming that Morrison would return from his new home in Paris to complete the material but unfortunately, he passed away July 3rd 1971 before he was able to record any vocals.
With this news rocking the band they became somewhat punch drunk, stumbling around trying to recruit the likes of Paul McCartney and Iggy Pop, before deciding that Jim Morrison, one of the greatest rock singers ever, didn’t need replacing and that both guitarist Robbie Krieger and keyboardist Ray Manzarek could handle vocal duties themselves. The result was Other Voices, released a mere three months after Morrison’s passing, it stripped The Doors, not just of an iconic voice, but of almost all personality they previously had. In terms of bad ideas, this is right up there, luckily they saw sense and disbanded in 1973, but the appearance of Other Voices in their discography remains a troubling reminder of a very troubling time for the band.
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Welcome back to Broken Records, where Steve and Remfry search for the least good of all the albums in the history of music. Today we’re once again joined by Tom Dare, host of the Hell Bent For Metal podcast, as we’re in bad heavy metal territory once again. Yup, the time has come for us to tackle the Blaze Bayley era of Iron Maiden with their 11th studio album Virtual XI from 1998.
The 90’s weren’t great for Maiden, and unlike a lot of bands they can’t really blame grunge. The faults of that decade were pretty much entirely all their own fault. After a patchy couple of final albums from Bruce Dickinson’s first run in the band, the iconic frontman stepped away from Maiden to make solo material that sounded… well, basically like Iron Maiden. Maiden themselves were charged with replacing their beloved vocalist and decided on Bayley, of Wolfsbane fame, to fill Dickinson’s mighty shoes. 1995’s The X Factor wasn’t particularly well received, but there were mitigating factors to make the case that it was just a blip. But then came Virtual XI, an album that was self produced, was marketed by the band making a fake football team and promoting a video game that wasn’t even out yet, despite neither of those things having anything to do with the album, and was given a lead single called The Angel and The Gambler which is nearly ten minutes long and is… look it’s not good. The record flopped and Maiden seemed destined for the knackers yard. Until they went back to Bruce and, you know, the rest is history. It’s worked out fine for them in the long run, but we still need to know; is Virtual XI really as bad as all that?
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Welcome to another episode of Broken Records, the podcast which desperately scours the music world and tries to answer that age old question; what is the worst album ever made? This week Steve and Remfry have a hot contender on their hands as they look at Paula by Robin Thicke, the 7th studio album from the soul-pop lothario, released on the 1st of July 2014.
Thicke had a pretty decent decade long career in the music industry by 2013, he may not have scaled the heights of a Justin Timberlake or an Usher, but his brand of slinky, sexy, soul was popular enough to earn him a decent following in the US, where he appeared on Oprah and supported Beyonce. But it all changed for him when he released the song Blurred Lines in 2013. The song, as we are sure you’re aware, was a monolithic hit, dominating the airwaves for the entire year, but came with plenty of criticism and controversy, the ugly sexual politics of the song were condemned by many, Thicke stirred the pot further with a overly sexualised performance at the 2013 MTV Awards with Miley Cyrus and the estate of Marvin Gaye launched a plagiarism lawsuit against the song as well. Thicke himself was now at the centre of a media storm, and when allegations of drugs, violence and infidelity came out in the aftermath, his wife of 9 years Paula Patton filed for divorce. Most people would take time away form the spotlight to address these problems in private, but Robin Thicke decided to do the absolute opposite of that, writing and recording an album named after his wife in a mere 7 week period that detailed their relationship in painstakingly minute detail in the vain hope of winning her back. It didn’t. It was a critical and commercial flop, and turned Thicke from one of the biggest stars in music into a washed up nobody practically overnight. Whether this is any good or not we will get to, but in terms of career suicide and a fall from grace, there aren’t many albums that can get close to Paula.
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Welcome back to another episode of Broken Records, where Steve and Remfry from that Riot Act show search for the worst album in the history of music. This week we are looking at the 4th album from South Africa post-grunge band Seether; Finding Beauty in Negative Spaces from back in 2007.
We don’t know much about Seether, other than some bloke at Sonisphere 2014 really liked them and bullied Steve into playing them on the radio, but it turns out they are a pretty big deal in the US. The band got a foot up from their association with Evanescence vocalist Amy Lee, who appeared on one of their songs and was dating frontman and guitarist Shaun Morgan for a period, before they split up and Lee penned her band's big song Call Me When You’re Sober about Morgan just a year before this record was released. Morgan did in fact try to get sober by checking himself into rehab in 2006, and when he came back, he penned this record full of chunky but unremarkable post-grunge rockers. The press didn’t much care for it, the band still went platinum, and got another boost when they covered George Michael’s immortal Careless Whisper in early 2009. So it hasn’t really done much to crush Seether’s career prospects, and they definitely steadied the ship after this rocky period, but, here’s the big question, is this actually any good at all?
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Welcome back to Broken Records, our weekly search for the worst album ever made in history. This week Steve and Remfry are looking at Shine On by Australian old school rock revivalists Jet, released on the 30th of September 2006.
It’s a place that we’ve been multiple times here on Broken Records, looking at the follow up album to the hit record from a garage rock/indie landfill band of the mid-00’s. Usually it would be the same ol’ conversation and we might even be telling you to skip this week's episode because, you know, you have heard us talk about all this stuff before, you know what we think about this music, you know how this story plays out. But, actually, no. There is a very different flavour and a very unique reason to tune in to the show this week. Yes, Jet had become massive off the back of the worldwide smash single Are You Gonna Be My Girl, and their debut album Get Born saw the band sell over 4 million albums worldwide, but they had to follow it up, meaning Shine On was birthed three years later into a world that wasn’t as interested in the indie rock stylings that the band clinged so tightly to. It probably would have been fine, they probably would have just gone away and none of us would ever have had a second thought about Shine On were it not for one thing; a monkey pointing his penis into his mouth and urinating straight down his throat. Confused? Yeah, Jet were too.
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Our search for the worst album of all time resumes, yes, it’s us here at Broken Records. Steve and Remfry head back to October 30th 2006 this week and look at the boom of deathcore with its most successful ever exponents; Bring Me The Horizon and their debut album Count Your Blessings.
It’s pretty odd to be thinking about BMTH today in the context of them being a scrappy, drunk bunch of kids trying to sound like The Red Chord, whilst they’re currently one of the biggest rock acts on the face of the planet and have just played the BRIT awards with Ed Sheeran. But, that’s what they were back on their debut album, and they were divisive as anything as well. Winning Kerrang Awards and hitting the top 100 in the UK album charts around the time this record was released, but also inspiring some truly eye-rolling gatekeeping comments from the metal scene at large, due to… we dunno, young girls liking them or something. So, were BMTH jumped up emo, scene kids, desecrating the good name of death metal, or were they miles ahead of their time and doing something that was so forward thinking that it scared the old guard and inspired the kids? Well, as usual, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Is Count Your Blessings actually any good? Have a listen and you’ll find out.
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Welcome back to Broken Records, the show that searches high, but more often, low for the worst album ever made. This week we are looking at one of the most obvious on paper albums in history; Danzig Sings Elvis from April 2020.
Surely Glen Danzig should have done this album ages ago right? The man has made a career from being a black clad, gothy version of The King, earning the nickname “Evil Elvis” dating all the way back to his time fronting goth-punk pioneers The Misfits. If there was a time for Danzig to start pulling out obscure Elvis songs and recording them to show his love for his biggest influence, then the early 90’s at the height of his fame would have been the best time to have done that, right? But he waited, and waited, and waited, until he came up with the idea in the aftermath of his 2015 covers album Skeletons. An album that saw him covering the likes of Black Sabbath, The Everley Brothers and… you guessed it, Elvis himself, it was also pretty terrible. A Misfits reunion, a new Danzig album and a movie written and directed by Glen himself, named Verotika, all got in the way of this album. The longer it went on, the more songs were added, turning it from its original idea of an EP into a 14 track album. It’s not got many of Elvis’ big hits on it, it’s recorded in a very low energy and low key style, but, here’s the big question, is Danzig Sings Elvis actually any good?
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Welcome back to a brand new entry into the catalogue of Broken Records, where Steve and Remfry search for the very worst album of all time. This week we come to you with a warning, this episode is not the usual laugh-a-thon that we pride ourselves on being. It’s a heavier and often upsetting episode as we look at the debut album from reality TV star Farrah Abraham, My Teenage Dream Ended, released on 1st of August 2012.
Abraham made her name as a 17 year old, on the MTV show 16 and Pregnant in 2008. The title of the show should make it pretty clear what that entails, and it set in motion a set of events that led to Abraham becoming a big star, but at a significantly high cost. Four years later, her story was chronicled in her first book, My Teenage Dream Ended, which also included a companion 27-minute album inspired by the events detailed in said autobiography.
Essentially, Abraham took a few lines from each chapter of the book and turned them into lyrics, which she gave to album producer FRDRK, who made her record her vocals to a click track and then put music (which Abraham never got to hear) over the top of it. The result was 27 minutes of utterly bizarre, pre-Hyper Pop, auto-tuned, electro, weirdness. The response was initially one of derision, but MTDE soon picked up a cult following from members of the indie press, who decided to anoint Abraham as some kind of avant-garde musical queen, much to the bemusement of many (including Abraham herself). It’s a fascinating, it often traumatising, story but the question is, who got this one right? Is it a forward thinking, deconstruction of pop in true outsider art fashion? Or is it a grubby, tuneless, cash grab from an industry determined to milk and exploit every last drop from another young, out of their depth, reality star?
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Welcome back to Broken Records, the podcast that searches for the worst record ever made in the history of music. This week Steve and Remfry travel back to Britain in that wondrous period of the late 90’s going into the early 2000’s as they look at You’Ll Love To Hate This, the long forgotten debut, and so far only, full length album from comedian, actor, presenter and… rapper… sort of… Richard Blackwood, released on the 11th of September 2000.
Who remembers Richard Blackwood… yeah?... a few… who remembers him for something other than not knowing how to grate lemon zest…? Okay, not so many of you. How about anything other than his recent appearances in big name UK soap operas Hollyoaks and Eastenders? Oooh, hardly anyone. Blackwood was, if you can believe it, a pretty big star in the UK from about 1998 to 2001, presenting a host of big name shows like Top of the Pops and MTV Select, before being given his own vehicle, The Richard Blackwood Show, in 1999. His star dropped pretty dramatically after the release of this album though, maybe it was too much of RB too soon, maybe we never really needed a UK version of Will Smith, or maybe it was just the staggeringly bad execution of this album, full of terrible rapping, cheap pop instrumentation and cheesy R&B fronting. Either way, this record is no fun. Less fun than having 18 litres of coffee shot up your arse? Well, we wouldn’t know about that… but we know a man who would! WE LOVE YOU RB, WE WATCH YOU EVERY NIGHT ON TV!!!
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On this weeks Broken Records Steve and Remfry continue their search for the worst album ever made by reacquainting themselves with an old friend. This is definitely not the first time we’ve spoken about death metal pioneers Morbid Angel’s 2011 comeback album Illud Divinum Insanus, but we’re obliged to do it and so we’re going in deeper than ever.
Quite what makes this record broken are things we’ve discussed in prior podcasts; the absurd and seemingly endless wait from the return of iconic frontman David Vincent in 2004 to the actual release of the album, the various line up changes, Vincent’s quite atrocious lyrics and, most importantly of all, the bands ludicrous attempts to broaden out their classic death metal style with some highly ill advised industrial metal influences. We’re not quite sure what they were going for, but, whatever it was, we’re pretty sure it wasn’t meant to end up sounding like Radikult does here. The death metal fans, famously known for their open mindedness, went mad and had a meltdown when the album was released, Vincent soon departed… even though he didn’t appear to be told about it, and both he and guitarist Trey Azagthoth spent the next few years blaming the other one for the stench that Illud Divinum Insanus made. Still, it’s not all bad, they did manage to release a three disc, 39 track, 3 hour and 5 minute long remix of the album, which surely gives them the world record for the single most pointless music release ever, the original artwork is good and, man, you should check out the lovely tin the CD comes in!
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Grab the coffee and the sleeping pills, this week's Broken Records is going to be a long one. Steve and Remfry are back, continuing their quest to find the worst album of all time, and today they have found the foolproof insomnia cure that is Phil Collins 7th solo album Testify, released on the 11th of November 2002.
Listen, we don’t want to hate too hard on Phil Collins, lord knows he’s had enough pops taken at him over the years. Particularly in the 90’s, when, after his commercial peak in the 1980’s, he was kicked from pillar to post (metaphorically speaking) by the likes of Noel Gallagher, U2 and even some random barman. Yes, Phil Collins in this era was the antithesis of cool Britannia, but he looked like he was going to have the last laugh when he hooked up with Disney at his lowest ebb and ended up a Golden Globe and Oscar winner after his work on the Tarzan soundtrack. You go Phil! You’ve proved all the haters and naysayers wrong! You’ve still got it! Now go make a cracking new solo album under your name and your rehabilitation will be complete… oh. Oh well. Testify was that album, and it’s fair to say that it killed the career renaissance of Phil Collins stone dead before it really even got started. Instead of the massive yacht pop bangers or atmospheric slow jams that he made his name on, Phil seemed incapable of creating anything on Testify that wasn’t pure, middling, bland, pop nothingness. Testify is just under an hour, but feels like it stretches time like a Matrix movie as song after song of paper thin, flat, uninspired and uninspiring noodling drag by. Phil, you fucked it mate, and the worst thing is, you made Noel Gallagher look like he was right about you. Shame that.
Phil Collins - Can't Stop Loving You (Official Music Video)
Phil Collins - Wake Up Call (Official Music Video)
U2 Drunk - dissing Phil Collins - Billboard Awards 1992
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Broken Records is here again, bringing you our search for the very worst album ever released in music history. This week Steve and Remfry are looking into the weird, wild and rarely wonderful world of Cyberpunk, the 5th studio album by the plastic punk superstar Billy Idol, released on the 29th of June 1993.
Billy Idol was, of course, a huge star as the 90’s came into view. With a string of MTV heavy hit singles in the previous decade he had become one of the music world’s most instantly recognisable faces. But the 1990’s was the decade that killed many a rock star, and Billy knew that he was going to have to fight off grunge if he was going to stay relevant. After nearly losing a leg in a motorcycle accident in 1990 he became fascinated with the underground subculture of cyberpunk, consuming the works of JG Ballard, Phillip K Dick and, most notably, William Gibson and using it as inspiration for a new record that was recorded completely at his home on a computer. In 1993! Imagine that! Idol ingrained himself so deeply into the subculture that he even set up an online account to chat to other cyberpunk aficionados and ask their advice on how the record based on the culture should look and sound. Still, when it came to the release of the record he might have wanted to listen to their advice a little more intently, as Cyberpunk is a messy dance rock concept album that bizarrely leans in on dated electronic sounds, cringe-y critiques of the LA riots, some exhausting new age hippie nonsense and a truly abysmal cover of The Velvet Underground’s Heroin. The critics hated it, it sold poorly, but, perhaps most gallingly for Idol, the cyberpunk community were furious. Trolling him on his personal email account and accusing him of appropriating their culture for his own financial gain. Obviously it was a different time, and that sort of thing doesn’t happen anymore… little bit of satire for you there.
Billy Idol - Shock To The System
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Hello and welcome back to another edition of Broken Records, the podcast that searches far and wide for the very worst album of all time. Today Steve and Remfry are talking about Lil Wayne’s The Rebirth, the 7th studio album from the New Orleans rapper, released on the 2nd of February 2010.
We can’t pretend that either of us are massive fans of Lil Wayne… or small fans… or fans. But there’s no doubt that he’s a pretty significant artist in the hip-hop world. By the year 2008 he was a legit superstar in fact, with his The Carter trilogy seeing him lauded all over the place and the third installment picking up the Best Rap Album Grammy. Not bad. He was restless though, and decided that, rather than go into the studio and give his fans The Carter IV, he would do a rock album. Rap and rock have always proved to be challenging bedfellows, for every Rage Against The Machine there is about 50 Vanilla Ice’s, Methods of Mayhem or whatever other cack we still have left in the hat. But, surely, a rapper of Weezy’s stature could put together a band with the chops to provide the killer backing to his unique and idiosyncratic drawl couldn’t he? You’d think, right… but alas no. The Rebirth is instead a confusing, often troubling and often hilarious mess of autotune mixed with paper thin pop punk and generic sleaze rock guitar that is hard, maybe impossible, to enjoy.
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Welcome to another episode of Broken Records, where Stephen Hill and Remfry Dedman take a deep breath, hold their nose and dive head first into some of the stinkiest musical moments ever in search for the very worst album of all time. Today we’re looking at I Am Me, the second full length record by US pop-rocker Ashlee Simpson, released on the 18th of October 2005.
With us both being UK based, we don’t actually know all that much about Miss Simpson. She never really cracked Britain, in fact all she is really known for is what she is most known for the world over - being the pop star who was “scandalously” caught lip-syncing on a 2004 episode of Saturday Night Live. Being a pop star (pop stars mime a lot by the way, SPOILER!) you’d think that this would be something of a non-event, but in actuality it became a massive great bastard stick to beat Simpson with for some time. Her career suffered a significant nose dive after the event, but rather than sit at home and mope, she got back in the studio and decided to chronicle her feelings in her second album. Which is what we get here. It’s not exactly groundbreaking, with Simpson claiming the record would lean on influences from the 80’s whilst being 'rawer' and 'realer', yet confusingly crediting her stylist, make up artist and hairdresser in the linear notes of the record. EH?! Still, did she redeem herself or does she show herself up to be the cynical pop puppet prat that the media spun her as?... Listen to find out what we think...
Ashlee Simpson - Boyfriend (Official Video)
Ashlee Simpson - L.O.V.E. (Official Music Video)
SNL Ashlee Simpson - Clean SDTV Video Capture
Owen Paul “My Favorite Waste Of Time” Lip Sync Fail BBC Pebble Mill
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Welcome to another search for the worst album of all time here on Broken Records. Steve and Remfry really don’t want to be here this week as they are covering an album by one of their heroes; the late, great Chris Cornell and his third studio album Scream released on the 10th of March 2009.
Cornell had become a legit mainstream star in the mid 00’s after his cover of Billie Jean by Michael Jackson was being karaoke-massacred by X-Factor contestants and his song You Know My Name being an actual Bond theme! Not bad for the singer in an alternative rock band that had split a decade earlier. Being hot stuff he decided to rope in pop producer extraordinaire Timbaland, he of the sublime work of early Jay-Z, Missy Elliott and Justin Timberlake’s banger filled Justified album, to work on some new material. An odd pairing? Maybe on paper, but then Cornell has a voice of such stunning quality that he would easily be able to pull off pretty much any genre right? Sure, but by this time Timbaland was working with the likes of New Kids on the Block, Black Eyed Peas and The Pussycat Dolls, and it was tempting to say that the pop revolution that he helped kick-start in the early part of the decade was starting to sound a little stale and oversaturated in 2009. What we got was an album that plays to neither man’s strengths, despite the two enthusiastically telling the press how great it was to be working with each other and both the rock and mainstream worlds looked at Scream like a middling half-way house that neither rocked like Cornell’s early material or made you want to get up and dance in the way that Timbaland at his best could. A shame, but then we got Soundgarden back for a few years in the aftermath, so was it really all that bad?
Videos
Chris Cornell - Scream (Official Music Video)
Chris Cornell - Part Of Me ft. Timbaland (Official Video)
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Welcome to another episode of Broken Records, our search for the very worst album that has ever dared to disgrace the good name of music. This week Steve and Remfry are joined by Tom Dare, host of the Hell Bent For Metal podcast, to talk about Supercharger, the fourth studio album by Oakland metal heroes Machine Head, released on the 2nd of October 2001.
After the lukewarm reception to 1999’s nu-metal leaning The Burning Red, Machine Head told the world that they were coming back swinging with some of the classic sounds of their beloved debut album Burn My Eyes. They certainly talked a good game, and having ditched the orange tracksuits, bleach blonde tipped spiky hair and “I’m mad I am!” facial expressions that characterised much of The Burning Red cycle, they looked the part too. In fact frontman Robb Flynn was more than confident that the band had “weathered the storm” and were going to be better than ever as the new Millennium arrived. Sadly, it didn’t quite work out that way, as Supercharger was a big ol’ flop of an album, the band themselves would point to a release around the time of the 9/11 terror attacks happening that saw the records lead single Crashing Around You dropped from radio and MTV for being a little too thematically close to the events of that day. Really though, that’s not the problem with Supercharger is it lads. This is a painfully long and oddly neutered album from a band who had proved one of metal’s most integral voices in the 90’s. As we know, the band definitely got their shit back together fairly quickly, but, as we discuss, it was touch and go for a while there for Machine Head.
Machine Head - Crashing Around You [OFFICIAL VIDEO]
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Happy new year and welcome back to our search for the worst album of all time. We’ve got a beauty for you this week as Steve and Remfry wrap their ears around Allow Us To Be Frank, the fifth studio album from Irish boyband sensation Westlife, released on the 8th of November 2004.
At this point in their career, Westlife had become a license to print money, simply from being nice, faceless boys singing balladic cover versions of increasingly dislikeable songs. In early 2004, the band's only recognisable member, Brian McFadden, had left the group, leaving… er… the other four to soldier on regardless. Thanks to the insane success of Robbie Williams' Swing When You’re Winning album, the music world was inundated with any-old-wanker donning a zoot suit and crooning out the hits of The Rat Pack. Some were fair enough; Seal? Sure. Micheal Bolton? Umm…if you like. Some were not; Bobby Davro? Definitely not. RON ATKINSON?! You’ve gone too far now!
Never ones to have an original idea in their collective heads or pass up the opportunity to make a quick buck, Westlife’s team (which included Louis Walsh and Simon Cowell) decided to get in on the swing revival and give the band a set of standards to karaoke their way through. The songs are undeniable and the members of Westlife have perfectly competent (if utterly soulless) singing voices but is that enough to save Allow Us To Be Frank from getting an absolute kicking?
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On this week’s episode, it feels like Steve and Remfry have very little to say about the album Atilla by Atilla, so they go off on all manner of tangents instead. You’ll enjoy that, we’re sure. Anyway, the Attila we’re talking about this week are not the rap-metalcore band that you probably know and begrudgingly tolerate, no, rather they are the proto-metal duo of Jon Small and Billy Joel. Yes, THAT Billy Joel. Their self-titled debut album was released in 1970 with Epic records signing the band and giving them fifty grand to record the scrappy compositions that they had pieced together. The result is an album that sounds a little bit like The Doors falling down the stairs, with a sleeve that might make you laugh, cry, vomit and bleed from the eyes all at once. And, frankly, the cover of the record is definitely the worst thing about this pretty ho-hum collection of songs, but it’s here because of one particularly harsh review it received and because Billy Joel hates it, and he went on to become… well… Billy Joel. Could be worse eh.
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