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Bands with the biggest hits and misses


Spaceman Spiff

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I've never completely forgiven Rod Stewart for his craptastic disco phase.  "Every Picture Tells a Story" is among the greatest albums in rock and roll history.  "Do You Think I'm Sexy?" makes be want to puncture my eardrums with an ice pick.

 

 

Actually, I think he was pretty good in both of those phases (given the inherent limitations of the Disco phase).    But that one song is pretty bad.   

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I liked it. Sorry I'm a "non-true" rap fan lol

 

True is a poor word - I meant not a diehard rap fan. Meaning people who don't wake up thinking about listening to Illmatic or Enter the Wu Tang: 36 Chambers.

 

I mean it's not a terrible album. Just a far far step down from Reasonable Doubt - Black Album.

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Metallica

 

Everything post-Justice blows donkey.

Everything after Metallica (black album) was pretty much garbage, one or two ok songs from Load and Reload.  St. Anger sucked.  Death Magnetic was ok/good, couple of good songs, rest pretty decent songs.

 

I wouldn't go as far as to say it was so horrible I hated it, had more of an old school feel.  But nothing compared to their early stuff.

I think this is a good one.

Only issue is that I liked their first album, a little bit of their second album and then they just fell off. I didn't like them sporadically, I like LP's early stuff and then hated what they became.

Same goes for many musicians.

I wonder if a band like Nirvana would have ended up like that if Kurt Cobain hadn't taken his own life. Their first album was legendary, second album was OK, the unplugged was pretty good.

This whole post made me think more about the subject.

My final answer: FOO FIGHTERS

 

Bleach, Nevermind, Incesticide, In Utero and the unplugged live were all excellent imo.   But I'm a huge Nirvana fan.

 

Foo Fighters, come on man :/

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It's tough to pick.......I'm gonna go with GnR.  Appetite for Destruction, Use Your Illusion 1 and 2 created so many awesome hits.  Then they fell completely off with The Spaghetti Incident and Chinese Democracy, those two were so horrible, I couldn't listen to them.

 

Those last two albums sucked so ****ing bad, I couldn't listen to them more than once.  I can listen to the top three mentioned, over and over and not get tired of them.  

 

That has to be the biggest gap between Awesome to Complete Suckage right?  I'm taking into account that while other bands like Metallica put out some horrible music, at least mixed in those albums were some songs that were pretty good/ok, that one would actually not hate it so much to turn it off.  

 

I despise every song on the last two GnR albums.  

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Everything after Metallica (black album) was pretty much garbage, one or two ok songs from Load and Reload.  St. Anger sucked.  Death Magnetic was ok/good, couple of good songs, rest pretty decent songs.

 

I wouldn't go as far as to say it was so horrible I hated it, had more of an old school feel.  But nothing compared to their early stuff.

 

 

Re: Metallica, the first four albums are the best, but I actually think I like Load better than the Black album.

 

I'll rank them:

 

Master of Puppets

Kill Em All

Ride The Lightning

Justice for All

Load

Black Album

Death Magnetic

Re-Load

St. Anger

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Pearl Jam

Some of their stuff is great, some is un-listenable.

 

I kinda get what you are saying but I think I'm in the minority with these guys.

 

Most people really love the first three albums:  Ten, Vs., and Vitalogy.

 

I really like all three, but I like No Code, Yield, and Binaural pretty much equally.  

 

That there, for me, puts Pearl Jam with 6 albums I really, really like.

 

The rest of the albums:  Riot Act, Pearl Jam, Backspacer, and Lightning Bolt each have songs I like, but I don't like that batch nearly as much as I do the first 6 albums.

 

So with 6 albums, I love, the puts Pearl Jam in a pretty elite class, like winning 6 superbowls or something.  Plus with those first 6 albums, they did it with 4 different drummers.

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both in my personal tastes...

 

an example of category 1:

 

1. Depeche mode... great through songs of faith and devotion, great in patches through exciter, terrible in all the albums starting with playing the angel

 

an example of category 2:

 

2. eric clapton... amazing into the late 70s, weird in the 80s, revitalized even if sappier in the 90s, and.... old but cool since

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I agree about Clapton. That's not necessarily a widely held opinion either. I have family members that liked the albums he made in the 80's. But there are stretches of his career that I do not care for. I wouldn't say I hate those albums, I just find them boring. I really enjoy some of his much more recent blues-work. He's such a serious musician that he was bound to bounce back and start making good music again. He's practically a musicologist.

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Two bands from the early to mid 2000's that jumped the shark: the Strokes and the Arctic Monkeys.

Is This It and Room on Fire are two of my all-time favorite albums, I still listen to them a lot. But everything that came after has been trash. It's depressing listening to their decline. It shows you how much their brilliance was a product of that late 90's New York Underground scene, and when that scene declined, they lost their way creatively. Drugs were probably an issue too.

Whatever People Say I am, I'm Not is also incredible. It's another one of my all time favorite albums. But it's like they became disillusioned by mega-fame and lost all of the piss and vinegar that gave them their edge. They didn't get incompetent, and in a vacuum, their subsequent work wasn't terrible. They just got boring and uninspired and I can't enjoy it because of how much I love the debut album.

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This thread has evolved into a discussion of artists that were great and then got less good over time.

 

Which is every musician ever for the most part (Neil Young may be the exception here).

 

I think the original post and Zoony's posts get it. RHCP and The Cure have great songs on albums next to absolutely unlistenable songs. That's a pretty remarkable talent.

 

I would throw Morrissey (as a solo artist) on that list too - though Morrissey is pretty freaking divisive.

 

I actually think the all-time champion of this is The Who. Until Tommy came along, it seemed like Townsend would wrote one incredible song a year and then scrape together stuff to put a full album together. All The Who's early stuff feel like Motown albums. One or two hits and a bunch of junk.


We need at least two separate lists:

1.) One for bands that once were great and then "jumped the shark"

2.) And one for bands that are sometimes great but also sometimes mail it in. They made good music again after an uninspired period.

 

 

The all-time champion of #2 is Bob Dylan. He seemed to have no earthly idea what he was doing from the Christian period to Time Out of Mind. Which is a 20 year period of crap followed by a period of excellence.

 

The interesting thing with Dylan is that his good albums have no bad songs, and his bad albums have maybe one outstanding song if you are willing to find it and a bunch of unlistenable garbage.

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How many musicians do you really have that like everything they do. I can think of a small handful. Everybody puts out head scratchers. We accept the strikeouts because of the home runs they hit

Yeah, that's a good point. I like for bands and artists to experiment. But sometimes that experimentation leads to phases that don't really work.

Also, there is a difference for me between an artist going down a creative rabbit hole I don't care for, and an artist pushing out work that is clearly uninspired. I can respect and maybe eventually grow to appreciate work that is strange, risky, and perhaps unsavory, but still coming from a place of inspiration. But uninspired work will probably always bore me and make me sad.

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