All Filler, No Killer: Ten records from our favourite bands we'd rather forget

As the return of The Strokes recently reminded us, there’s nothing sadder than a creative lowpoint for a once-loved band. Sustaining a heightened level of quality across a fifteen year career is an impossible feat – few even manage it for three consecutive records.

The history of modern music is strewn with duds from the great and good. The Beatles may have avoided turning in a truly terrible long-player but had they lasted another decade, we’re pretty sure to have seen some overwhelmingly poor choices turning up. Just look at what happened to The Rolling Stones. Bob Dylan arguably hit a wall when he dallied a bit too close with the Christian sentiments for 1978′s Street Legal, a record that’s almost beyond salvation.

The best approach for us fans is to usually to turn a blind eye and imagine the whole sorry mess never happened. Below, Best Fit writers and staff try and place the records they’d choose to erase from the history of their favourite bands.

10. Bright Eyes – Cassadaga (2007)

When Johnny Depp names your record one of his “favourite things” of the year – not “albums” but “things”, you know it’s going to be debatable. This is a man, after all, who has been best friends with both Hunter S. Thompson and Charlie Sheen at various points in his lifetime.

Following up on not one but two pretty stellar albums was never going to be easy for Conor Oberst and Co. I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning from 2005 saw the Bright Eyes man stripping away his previously melodramatic tendencies for a more mature and fluid folk collection that truly lived up to his wide billing as “the next Bob Dylan”. This was accompanied in a dual release by the record’s alter-ego of sorts, the electronically-charged sonic exploration of love, drugs and surrealism that was Digital Ash In A Digital Urn.

With three years passing, how do you top two records that would normally define any artist’s career? Not by bringing out something like Cassadaga, that’s for sure. While showing brief moments of redeeming qualities in ‘Middleman’ or ‘Lime Tree’, the album was doomed from the very beginning. A record born in the aftermath of mainstream success saw Oberst spiral into his own ego, simultaneously trying too hard to live up to – whilst also rejecting – increased expectations. Not as experimentally defiant as follow-up The People’s Key, without the early angst and melancholy that has plagued him with the ‘emo’ tag ever since.

It remains – now that the band leader has seemingly dropped his popular moniker in favour of his birth-given name – a rare miss in a career-to-date of consistant hits.

Luke Morgan Britton

9. Bruce Springsteen – Working on a Dream (2009)

Part of being a true Bruce Springsteen fan is admitting which of his records are just bad. Both Bruce himself, who has already all but ditched every single track from this abominable recent LP from his marathon live sets, and Boss devotees – who on last year’s Wrecking Ball tour booed the very suggestion that the band roll out the title track – seem in agreement. It’s hard to think of anyone but folks on the E Street payroll and close family members who’d regard Working On A Dream as anything other than a mistake.

It was all the more disappointing coming as it did off the back of Bruce’s first purple patch in more than a decade. 2002’s The Rising reunited the E Street band in full for the first time since Born In The U.S.A. and really struck a chord (an A major, most likely) in post 9/11 America. It was followed with the fine introspective acoustic LP Devil’s and Dust and considered Bush Administration critique of full-band effort Magic, which I’d argue is even better – all the wry social commentary of The Rising without the cloying bombast. That album also saw Springsteen jumping on the campaign trail for a certain Barack Obama, which proved to work out well for the both of ‘em; whilst Obama swept into office, Springsteen found his critical stock higher than it had been since Tunnel of Love, and thus raced back in to the studio, mere months after Magic, to strike whilst the iron was hot.

Yet where the young Springsteen could bash out bohemian folk classics like Greetings From Asbury Park, NJ and The Wild, The Innocent And The E-Street Shuffle within the space of a few months in 1973, the hurried Working On A Dream came across like a bunch of Magic – but far from magical – b-sides. Everything Springsteen haters dislike about the guy is here in abundance; syrupy, pompous, jingoistic and overcooked rock and roll redeemed only by the more reserved ‘Life Itself’ and Grammy-nominated ‘The Wrestler’ (technically a bonus track anyway). Elsewhere, it contains inarguably his two worst ever songs – the under-thought ‘Happy Birthday’ re-write ‘Surprise, Surprise’ and ‘Queen of the Supermarket’, in which Bruce tells a tale of falling in love with a shelf stacker in a manner that manages to convince a grand total of nobody at all that he spends any time in supermarkets.

Thankfully, the subsequent Wrecking Ball was actually pretty good. So let’s never speak of this again.

Tom Hannan

8. The Shins – Port of Morrow (2012)

The Shins, for me, were always the shining Gold Standard of just how good a certain brand of so-called “indie” or, if you must, “indie-pop” music could be. Debut Oh, Inverted World quickly became a favourite on its release in 2001, then along came second album Chutes Too Narrow two years later, and all of a sudden – hey – I had a Favourite Band.

The Shins made music that was more than just a jangle and a transient hit of sugar. These songs had melodies that were at the same time intricately structured and complex – just try whistling or humming along to ‘Young Pilgrims’ or ‘Kissing the Lipless’ for example – yet somehow still insanely beguiling. Every time I listen to one of the first three albums, the resultant earworms can literally run for weeks.

And for anyone who likes an intriguing lyric here, again, is Your Band, from the wonderful relish with which James Mercer delivers polysyllabic words like “malcontent” or “unconscionable” to the faintly disturbing imagery, often at odds with the alluring melodies and musicianship: “those lingering voices are just your ego’s attempt to make it all clean and nice, and make a moron out of you” from ‘Fighting in a Sack’, the faintly vampiric short poem that is Oh, Inverted World’s ‘Weird Divide’, Wincing The Night Away’s ‘Phantom Limb’, full of a kind of nostalgic, uneasy malaise.

After coming wonderfully good again on Album Number Three (2007’s Wincing the Night Away) despite the dauntingly-high expectations raised by 2004 film Garden State (sample quote: “You gotta hear this one song . It’ll change your life, I swear”), it seemed like this was a band, the band, my band, that was untouchable and perfect.

And then, last year, Port of Morrow came out. Early single ‘Simple Song’ augured well, but it turns out it was the only decent track, the only Shins track, as I would class it, on the album. That I am sitting here struggling to even recall any of the others – all I can remember is a kind of diffuse, generic, bland indie of the stereotypical kind that I always used the band as a counter example to in those kinds of arguments that probably dog any “indie” music fan’s musical discussions – probably says as much as needs to be said. I write this very much more in sorrow than in anger. Like a wonderful TV series that went on just one season too long (oh hai, The Wire?), if the band had stopped in 2007 we would now be left with pretty much the perfect (my perfect) back catalogue. Damn.

Jude Clarke

7. R.E.M. – Around the Sun (2004)

The thing about Around the Sun is that if you held a gun against my head or that of my nearest and dearest and demanded I whistle or sing any of the tracks on the album, I just couldn’t do it. I’d be a goner. Nothing. It’s a huge, terrifying black hole of a record, and don’t let anyone tell you that it’s just average or only pales in comparison to R.E.M.’s sparkling back catalogue – it’s not true, Around the Sun is an embarrassment to the memory of the band.

Released in 2004 it was their thirteenth (clearly unlucky in this case) album and third without drummer Bill Berry. It’s not like the band had been in freefall since Berry left, but they certainly weren’t the same. The first post-Berry release, Up, stands proudly alongside New Adventures in Hi Fi as the sound of R.E.M. pushing themselves somewhere new and interesting but things took a swift dive with the release of the anodyne Reveal, itself a fairly horrible nadir with all the forced sunny-ness as Buck, Mills and Stipe pretended that they still got on okay. But compared to Around the Sun that record sounds like fucking Murmur - heck even Peter Buck couldn’t refer to it by name in interviews.

It’s a crock from start to finish, a clueless meander round half-ideas, woeful attempts at political polemic and you’d think that they would have learned from KRS-One’s appearance on ‘Radio Song’ on Out of Time that there’s no place for rapping on an R.E.M. record. Nope, hang it! Let’s get Q-Tip in for a few rhymes on ‘The Outsiders’ and hope he doesn’t sound like a befuddled old man wondering what he’s walked into (he does). There’s a track on the album called ‘The Worst Joke Ever’, and it contains the lines: “you see there’s this cat burglar who can’t see in the dark / he lays his bets on 8 more lives, walks into a bar / slips on the 8 ball, falls on his knife / says ‘I don’t know what I’ve done but it doesn’t feel right’”. Remember when you couldn’t understand any of Michael Stipe’s lyrics? Was that just a cover for banal shite like this?

Around the Sun is special for the fact it contains R.E.M.’s single worst song, ‘Make It All Okay’, and I long for the time at the start of writing this piece when I couldn’t remember how any of these songs went. Maybe I’d blocked out the awfulness as some kind of psychological defence – now they’re fresh in the memory again. I was asked if there was anything that redeems the album; the answer is no. It is by far the worst R.E.M. album in the canon.

Andrew Hannah

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6. The Charlatans – Simpatico (2006)

It’s impossible to read an article about The Charlatans nowadays without seeing them referred to as the Survivors of Britpop and / or Madchester. Whether that should be taken as a compliment or not is negligible. The fact remains that, after 25 years, they’ve never rested on their laurels when it comes to challenging themselves musically. After all, rehashing their original ‘baggy’ sound of the early nineties countless times would be about as thrilling and essential as a Shed Seven reunion. From 1994′s bleak and insular Up To Our Hips through to 2001′s Wonderland, the band consistently strived to keep things interesting for themselves. Be it Rolling Stones swagger, Bob Dylan cribbing or Curtis Mayfield impersonations, Charlatans fans were always left surprised and – most of the time – satisfied.

Things took a bit of a downward spiral after 2004′s Up At The Lake. Not a bad record per se, but hardly inspiring either. It was the sound of a band approaching middle age; an attempt at a more ‘grown up’, pastoral sound. Less anthemic, more thoughtful and pensive. Hardly a game changer, it was largely ignored and subsequently is the only Charlatans record not to receive a US release, but held against its 2006 follow-up Simpatico, Up At The Lake could now be deemed as a bloody triumph.

Simpatico, ultimately, is The Charlatans foray into the dodgy territories of reggae. And, considering the musical knowledge and skill of the group’s five players, it needn’t have been as terrible as it seems on paper – or indeed, on record. However, due to it sounding less like The Specials and more like UB40 meets Hard-Fi (yes, it really is that bad) and Tim Burgess’ comic attempt at ‘skanking’ (see his brilliantly terrible Jamaican pronunciation of “paradise” during ‘City Of The Dead’) – the record was a disaster and a huge trauma for all concerned: mainly, the listener.

Its only saving grace was the wonderful opener ‘Blackened Blue Eyes’: a distant cousin to the classic sound of 1996 anthem ‘One To Another’. With its devastating rhythm section and Burgess’ finest vocal performance in recent years, it could easily be held high next to the band’s finest work.

Rich Thane

5. Japan – Adolescent Sex (1978)

Having been just too young to discover and follow their career contemporaneously, my exploration of the band Japan (and, for many years after, lead singer David Sylvian’s inventive and increasingly experimental/challenging solo output) started with their final album and then worked backwards.

1981’s Tin Drum combined a slick veneer that appealed to my then 13 year old sensibilities with a darkness, a sultriness and an overriding air of mystery (the atmospheric grey artwork, Mick Karn’s distinctive bass lines, that vocal, the sparse, eerie mood of tracks like ‘Ghosts’ and ‘Still Life in Mobile Homes’) that intrigued and fascinated me. These were tales of a life beyond anything I had thus far known, even geographically exotic (‘Cantonese Boy’, ‘Visions of China’) as well as emotionally mysterious and complex.

I had found my first “favourite band”. Tracking backwards, saving up my pocket money to buy another of their albums every few weeks from Aylesbury’s Our Price or WH Smiths, soon I was completely wrapped up in the world of Gentlemen Take Polaroids and – probably my favourite of their releases – Quiet Life. Watching the band develop, in reverse, was enthralling and satisfying, the nascent music snob in me enjoying finding more grit and authenticity beneath the elegance and that unique, atmospheric, uncategorisable and – yes – massively sexy vocal, tracking the references to all things oriental that peppered their work, making the back catalogue my own.

Then I reached 1978. For some reason, probably economic, I bought the band’s first two albums (both released in the same year) on one double-sided cassette. Side one Adolescent Sex, side two Obscure Alternatives. At that size the art work looked, well, surprising, when held next to Tin Drum’s album cover, or indeed anything that had gone before, and as for the music it contained, well, gosh.

This was a totally different Japan to the band that my friends and I had grown used to swooning over, carving “Ghosts” onto school desks when we were meant to be sitting exams, analysing lyrics with a naivety that is now, looking back, quite touching. This was a – gasp – kind of punky, kind of glam, kind of metal band. And hadn’t we just worked out that heavy metal was the worst of the genres, its fans the diametric opposite of the elegant and beautiful New Romantic boys that we aspired to kiss at discos, to hold hands with as we walked around the Market Square at the weekend? Of course, that the band were inspired in the early stages of their career by The New York Dolls was, in retrospect, no bad thing. There was also a fire in their bellies, audible in the music at this point much more than at any later point.

Teenage me, though, would have none of it. The cassette was deposited in the lower reaches of my bedroom, where it would gather dust for many years to come, all sorts of early lessons about fandom, completism and musical evolution truly learned. ‘Communist China’ wasn’t bad, mind you.

Jude Clarke

4. Bonnie Prince Billy - …sings Greatest Palace Music (2004)

What I hate most about the concept of Bonnie Prince Billy’s Sings Greatest Palace Music is how the re-recorded versions of the tracks on the record make me almost unable to listen to the glorious originals. Other than a celebration of it being, in 2004, ten years since the release of Days In the Wake, there seemed little point in ever releasing this vile tribute.

If I was to choose a best-of track list of my favourite Palace songs, the fan-selected 15 here would be as close as I could get to the perfect introduction to Will Oldham’s wondrous back catalogue under his first (and best) moniker. Why then, other than out of sheer mischief and wilful career sabotage, would Oldham get a bunch of seasoned Nashville players on board to lay down schmaltzy, saccharine, emotionless renditions of his finest moments? Sure, this is typically obtuse behaviour on the Bonnie Prince’s part as someone who’s often tested patience with name changes and slightly-too-prolific quantity over quality approach to his recorded output. However, Sings Greatest Palace Music is probably the only record of his that I would avoid going back to listen to.

I know many people who would like to give Oldham a mighty smack in the mouth for destroying what’s often thought of as his best song, ‘New Partner’, by turning it into something that Nashville’s Rayna James would turn down for being too cheesy. It’s all horrible MOR guitar, gut-churning fiddle and Oldham’s voice is as bad as it’s ever sounded – and not just on this song. Throughout the record his voice is devoid of any emotion, even when ‘Ohio River Boat Song’ is turned into an upsettingly jaunty hoe-down Oldham barely rises beyond a bored whisper. Yes, yes, he’s never had much of a voice but the cracked yelps of Days In the Wake are part of what made it such a stunning, stark record.

There’s also a question of honesty here; does Oldham really believe these songs should sound like this? Are they more honest, or in fact is this whole project a discourse in dishonesty? Worse than that, is he just taking the piss out of fans and laughing at anyone who bought (or, dare I say, enjoyed) this record? There are so many things so desperately wrong with Sings Greatest Palace Music it’s hard to know where to begin so it’s easiest to return to the opening paragraph: this is an appalling record simply because it almost ruined a handful of albums in the space of about 45 minutes.

Andrew Hannah

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3. Ryan Adams – Rock N Roll (2003)

One of the most prolific artists of the past fifteen or so years, Ryan Adams’ career has carved him out to be one of the finest and most respected singer-songwriters around. His solo albums Heartbreaker, Gold, Cold Roses, Ashes & Fire, Jacksonville City Nights – all shining examples of nye on flawless song craft and borderline lyrical genius. Perfection though, comes at a cost – and in Adams’ case, the term ‘prolific’ doesn’t align itself all too well with the all important necessity of ’quality control’.

Rock N Roll, released in 2003, was without doubt a contractual obligation. A two finger salute to his then label Lost Highway after they rejected his sprawling ode to depression, addiction and heartache that made up Love Is Hell (which, was eventually released just a few months later). After the huge commercial success of 2001 breakthrough album Gold, the suited label heads deemed its follow-up to be too bleak and ushered Adams back into the studio to record something more ‘suitable’ for his ever growing legion of fans. Two weeks later he returned with Rock N Roll, or rather, to coin a phrase from Spinal Tap, a “Shit Sandwich”.

An overblown, sloppy, cock in hand pastiche to Adams’ heroes and current music biz buddies, listening ten years on – it really is as bad as we remember, albeit now at least we can have a little LOL about it thanks to a bucket load of hindsight.

Recorded with Ryan’s best friend Johnny T on drums and a long list of unlikely contributors – namely Green Day’s Billy Joe Armstrong, Smashing Pumpkins’ Melissa Auf der Maur and er… Parker Posey – Rock N Roll (whether intentional or not) was an attempt by Adams to appear more ‘cred’; to shed the nu-country poster boy image by revealing to the world that he actually enjoys to shred a guitar from time to time. It’s just a shame the songs didn’t live up to his ego.

An embarrassing listen from start to end with few (read: two) saving graces, it’s hard to focus on any one bad element so we’ll instead set you a challenge: If you can make it all the way through the sub-Oasis drudge of ‘Shallow’ without feeling just a little bit ashamed of yourself, drink a shot of something strong. Repeat this process with each subsequent track and, if you make it to the end of the record’s fifteen songs (you won’t): you’ll be drunk, miserable and terribly confused – much like poor old Ryan was at the time.

Rich Thane

2. David Bowie – Never Let Me Down (1987)

Never Let Me Down isn’t just the worst album in David Bowie’s career, it’s one of the weakest records by a major artist you’ll ever hear.

For all the bluster about Bowie’s ill-conceived experiments with industrial production, jungle beats and cosying up to the likes of Trent Reznor in the nineties, there was at least evidence there of trying to push some kind of envelope (however unpalatable it might have sounded at times). Nevertheless, that period of his career also produced some tracks that rank among his finest latter years works (‘The Heart’sFilthy Lesson’, ‘I’m Afraid of Americans’) and in Rolling Stone‘s review of Never Let Me Down, writer Steve Pond pointed out that Bowie’s “ace in the hole is his ability to give even disappointing albums benchmark hit singles.” That was not the case here though.

Never Let Me Down is the sound of one man embracing a genre sound and falling into the trap of not looking beyond own self image. By the mid-80s, riding high on the success of Let’s Dance (and perhaps as a result of almost absolute acceptance) he floundered creatively. That decade was an artistic test for most of modern music’s greats. Those who had released seminal works in the late sixties and early seventies found that the eighties offered a more challenging market to conquer. Celebrity suddenly dominated on an unprecedented level, with the surface now judged to be as important (if not more) than the depth.

It’s easy for even a semi-serious Bowie fan to avoid the 1987 disaster altogether and chances are you’ve never heard of a single track from Never Let Me Down. The trio of singles the album produced barely even register a reaction when I name them to a friend who knows every nuance of the Berlin Trilogy, every dramatic chord change on Ziggy Stardust and Hunky Dory; it’s almost as if I’ve made them up. We watch the video for ‘Time Will Crawl’ together with similarly aghast expressions: it’s musically, artistically, emotionally bankrupt. Like most of the record, it sounds like a commission for a direct-to-video eighties erotic thriller starring a post-St Elmo’s Fire Andrew McCarthy, soundtracking a badly edited montage that sees the protagonist wind up in bed with the woman he’s meant to be investigating.

The low point of the record is undoubtedly ‘Glass Spider’ which verges way beyond the parodic, with an introduction that recalls Spinal Tap’s ‘Stonehenge‘.

Bowie would later call the record his “nadir” explaining that “I didn’t really apply myself. I wasn’t quite sure what I was supposed to be doing. I wish there had been someone around who could have told me.”

Paul Bridgewater

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1. Prince – Come (1994)

Come is bad, sure, but it’s deliberately bad; one of the albums Prince wrote to fulfil and effectively terminate the contract he was under with Warner Bros that limited him to releasing a sensible amount of music per year rather than the constant slew of ideas he felt he should be able to unleash on a whim.

Told by label execs that he’d never write another number one hit, legend has it he went home and wrote ‘The Most Beautiful Girl In The World’ the same night, deciding to release it under the name of an unpronounceable symbol to get around Warner Bros’ pesky legal mumbo jumbo. Of course, it topped charts worldwide, and was the centrepiece of 1995’s vastly underrated Gold Experience LP but Come, the album he turned in to his label but months prior, was awful by design – they technically owned his name, and he wanted to punish them for not giving it back.

Come has three saving graces, of sorts. One of them is ‘Letitgo’, a passable slice of early 90s R&B that neither offends nor embarrasses, and is actually kinda fun. The other two I’ll mention because of their sheer hilarity. There’s an opening eleven minute long funk workout, which is called ‘Come’, on an album called Come, has a chorus that repeatedly goes “Come!”, starts with the line “Come over here – if you’re over 18” and well, if I need to explain the fun in that to you, yourself and Prince’s back catalogue are never going to get along. The second is the closing track, ‘Orgasm’, in which Prince brings a woman to climax on a beach using nothing but his guitar and the whispering of sweet nothings in her ear like “imagine what you look like from across the room”.

The rest of it however all sounds like demos for what could be reasonable songs, deliberately left half finished. I’d wager he’s written about 90 hours of music like the phoned-in soul of ‘Dark’ (basically the amazing ‘Slow Love’ stripped of all life and personality), knocked out the dated, directionless funk of ‘Race’ in his sleep, and why he thought ‘Loose’ – which sounds like something off Graffiti Bridge remixed by The Prodigy (oh, god) – was a good idea baffles me to this day.

Thing is, of course, he knew it wasn’t a good idea. There’s a reason Come is credited not to ‘Prince’ but ‘Prince – 1958-1993’; he was essentially trying to kill the very idea of Prince off by setting him on autopilot and crashing in to the Warner Bros. head office. Mission accomplished.

Tom Hannan