Broken Records - The Search for the Worst Album Ever

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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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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