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What Are the Most Disappointing Albums?
- digital-rubber 11y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGJkAye0Kfw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGJkAye0Kfw
- gerty 11y agoMetallica should be an honorary member in any such grouping.
- phatbyte 11y agoIn the inconsistent group for sure
- 33degrees 11y agoI'd say they've been consistently mediocre for the last while
- marcinx27 11y agoThey have the consistently great part up to (and possibly including) the black album. Then they start to fall into the disappointing category.
- at-fates-hands 11y agoI'm still trying to figure out what happened to them. I guess a multitude of bad things happening all the same time? After Jason left, and St. Anger came out, I just checked out. At the time there were so many other great metal bands to see and hear which completely eclipsed them.
- pageld 11y agoDeath Magnetic isn't too bad. Not Puppets good. But I listen to it every once in a while, where St. Anger was the most disappointing thing I ever experienced musically. You have to remember St. Anger was a full 6 years after they put out anything original. They were trying to rekindle the old stuff, but it's hard to remember how it was to be hungry after being on top for so long. If you ever saw the making of St. Anger documentary, you knew there was no way it was going to be good. James went into rehab 1/2 way through production out of nowhere. Everyone was angry with each other. Krik just wanted to play and then hang out with his horses on his ranch. Lars forgot how to drum. It was really bad. Then all of a sudden they finally adjusted to being sober and hey, look at that. Something pretty good.
- at-fates-hands 11y agoI saw the documentary and it was pretty eye opening. It was a complete train wreck, and Bob Rock and everybody else around them telling them St. Anger was going to be as good as the black album was pretty cringe inducing. The Crazy Cabby scene I thought to myself, "Jesus man, just tell them it sucks, just be honest. Someone has to have the balls to tell them this is horrible." My favorite part of the documentary was when Jason quit and was playing with Echobrain and James and Lars went to go see him. He totally fled the scene and wouldn't talk to them. Even years later, he's still bitter about what James did: http://loudwire.com/jason-newsted-why-he-left-metallica/ http://loudwire.com/jason-newsted-why-he-left-metallica/ Death Magnetic is pretty decent. After hearing interviews with James saying it was a return to the thrash metal of Master and Ride the Lightening saying they were going back to their roots, I was pretty disappointed.
- 72deluxe 11y agoI like their angry song about batteries.... I know I get that angry when my laptop is running out of charge, that's for sure!
- fredley 11y agoTook me a while to process the graph, since Random Access Memories was not where I expected it to be - based on my own experience, I expected it to be strongly disappointing.
- saturdaysaint 11y agoThat's such a weird case. IMO, the leap in rating is nothing more than critics finally catching up and understanding what they were doing. If the RAM master tapes got magically timetravelled back to 2006 they would have gotten the same middling ratings. Conversely, I'd argue that the most disappointing album was also a product of critic quirks more than anything - they vastly overrated the mopey indie rock of The Antlers during the last years where that was fashionable.
- jasode 11y ago> was not where I expected it to be - based on my own experience, The disconnect happens because you're comparing your individual taste to a metascore -- an aggregation of other critics' reviews. Everybody will dislike or be disappointed in something that the majority will like.
- baldfat 11y agoI find critic reviews to be of minimal value. My personal likes and dislikes are not correlated to critics ratings. Music reviews can be very political or based on popularity of the artist(s). In gaming a very low score can almost always mean a very flawed game. In music a low score can just mean that artist didn't progress enough or wasn't what is in fashion right now.
- arscan 11y agoIt did win best album of the year at the Grammies, which is probably as strong an indicator that you can get that critics liked it. I was surprised that their earlier albums weren't better received by critics though.
- coldpie 11y ago
- Spearchucker 11y agoI'm not sure what I'm supposed to take away from this article that I didn't know before reading it. I know that some albums are disappointing. That sometimes successful albums from an artist are followed by unsuccessful ones. This is a bit like saying that the sky is blue, water is wet... Unless of course I'm missing the point, which is entirely possible.
- coldtea 11y agoYou missed the whole: a) formalizing of the concept of dissapointing (the particular statistical method they used), and b) the particular list of albums they gave, using said method Both things you didn't knew beforehand (and even if you did most didn't).
- ctdonath 11y agoThere's a difference between the vague "yeah, some albums are subjectively disappointing" vs "these albums are disappointing for these objective criteria". Yes, the sky is blue. What shade? what's the gradient? what factors affect it? what causes a staggeringly "sky blue" color as opposed to blue-tinted overcast? how does looking thru a projected shadow affect what's seen? I had an art teacher point out that the lesson on painting landscapes included explaining to kids that the sky comes all the way down to the horizon, something that startled most of them. Yes, you know. How well?
- cag_ii 11y ago> "these albums are disappointing for these objective criteria". Except that the actual scores used to make this "objective" analysis are largely subjective.
- onion2k 11y agoThis is a very disappointing album: https://www.facebook.com/me/photos_of https://www.facebook.com/me/photos_of
- VeejayRampay 11y agoMos Def's (Yasiin Bey's) The Ecstatic is a classic, not surprised to see as an unexpected success.
- Expeditus419 11y agoAgreed great album. Not surprised to see Lupe's LASERS on most the disappointing list.
- Steko 11y agoIdlewild scores 72 which is pretty solid but makes the 'top 20 disappointing' because the previous two Outkast albums averaged 90+ and a straight arithmetic difference is used (with percentage of previous two it would rank somewhat lower).
- protomyth 11y agoA bit of New York Yankees or Jimmie Johnson (NASCAR) syndrome. If you don't win the championship then it is a disappointment.
- Shivetya 11y agoI would prefer charts based solely on album sales, metascore while interesting is full of bias. There are some artists who cannot be scored below certain thresholds either because of likability or political correctness. However total sales is usually a better indicator and longevity of sales, as in how long after initial debut did sales stay good.
- amelius 11y agoBut what if there are people who buy the album, only to find out later that it was disappointing? Or fans, who buy the album regardless of quality.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- usrusr 11y agoSales numbers are not that exciting when some people can look at actual streaming statistics. Something like http://poly-graph.co/timeless/ http://poly-graph.co/timeless/ with album sales vs median track streaming count would be interesting. (median, because albums are not about hit songs)
- shas3 11y agoIn addition to the biases, there is another flaw in this analysis- they assume that quality is a linear function of critic scores. So, jumping from 30 metacritic score to 50 metacritic score is considered the same as jumping from 60 to 80. This is quite unlikely to be the case. Thus, they should at least also incorporate absolute Metacritic score into the 'disappointment metric'. As an example, Kanye's MBDTF is great, but his two albums prior to it were 'very good', with an average of 77. While, Lenny Kravitz went from 58 to 70, i.e. 'ok' to 'pretty good'. You should penalize higher absolute scores on previous albums for 'surprisingly successful'. Likewise, higher absolute scores on current albums must be penalized in the criterion for 'most disappointing'. One certain way of addressing these biases and the linearity assumption is by plotting the distribution of metascores, and using that as a prior to improve fairness.
- FireBeyond 11y ago
- wodenokoto 11y agoShouldn't they count the 4 albums with the largest variance in the average between the four albums? > We determined the overall average score for all of these > artists and then looked at how much an individual artist’s > average album deviated from this score. Wouldn't this make a consistently below average artist count as an inconsistent?
- leoc 11y agoFor a band member or solo performer, it must be grim to sit contemplating an album which you yourself know is no good, and is likely to be career-wounding, but which you'll more or less have to release anyway for contractual reasons or for the money.
- 72deluxe 11y agoI suppose the thing to ensure is that you don't get into a contract where you have to do that. If you are releasing bottom-of-the-barrel tat for money just to be popular and sell albums, does that mean that the first release you put out was drivel just to be popular? Thought-provoking eh? They could just put out an album that's completely different, like Tom Jones did when he didn't want to release another Sex Bomb...
- jleyank 11y agoGranted it's not all that new, but Calling All Stations by Genesis was probably the worst I've ever heard. It did so poorly it killed the tour and put the band into hiatus. Pretty impressive results for a band that had been on top for decades. Yeah, they lost Phil Collins, but forgetting how to write music or lyrics was a real surprise. George Starostin's review nailed it...
- 72deluxe 11y agoI've never heard that album but looking it up, I never realised that Spock's Beard's drummer had a hand in it, and Ray Wilson. Wow, never knew that thanks! I think I have a couple of Ray Wilson albums he brought out on the Inside Out label before it went bust in Germany - there was a rerecording of "Inside" on it but I can't remember any of the other songs because they start, introduce a verse and then end without any instrumental breaks, which I was hoping for...
- devin 11y agoYou get 24 years to make your first album, and 24 months to make your second.
- mzs 11y agoSadly no, you get 18 months to make what your label wants your first album to be, then if you're lucky you get 35 years to make what you wanted your first album to be. This was starting to change, but the gaming is starting a new.
- mzs 11y agoI wish The Ventures made the list somewhere, maybe in most consistent, but I would guess they do not have enough reviews to fit the criteria of the article. http://www.markprindle.com/ventures.htm http://www.markprindle.com/ventures.htm