Up, Down.....

[EasilyConfused]

What's the biggest fall from grace you can recall?

...for example, I bought 'Clap your Hands Say Yeah' eponymous debut and was knocked out by the fresh catchy songs and raw simplicity of it all....then along came 'Some Loud Thunder'. Holy sh!t! what a sack of cak that is. I would, without a doubt, any day of the week, rather listen to thunder!
Then there was DC Basehead's 'Play with toys' - Top 20 all time album (I.M.H.O.) Followed by 'Not in Kansas Anymore'...not in my collection anymore!
Obviously this wil be debatable - not everyone will agree with me that after 'Ten', 'Vs' sounded like a pile of pants.

Whaddya think...?

[Mark Lanctot]

Beck has really annoyed me - Odelay is very good, but almost everything he's released since has been just about unlistenable to me. He partially redeemed himself with Guero and only fully redeemed himself with The Information - took over 10 years! He just changes musical styles way too frequently, and for my tastes, not for the better!

Buck 65's Talkin' Honky Blues is a triumph on every track, but his latest album Secret House Against the World is horrible. Turns out he let his French girlfriend do backing vocals, and the whole thing sounds like warmed-over dogfood.

[Kyle]

I'd have to say Rod Stewart. "Every Picture Tells A Story" was a dynamic, innovative album. Nearly everthing since has been over-commercialized drivel.

[EasilyConfused]

Fair enough so far guys....but I'm thinking consecutive albums, follow-ups, second album syndrome...hero to zero in the space of two albums kinda thing.

[Mark Lanctot]

Fair enough so far guys....but I'm thinking consecutive albums, follow-ups, second album syndrome...hero to zero in the space of two albums kinda thing.

It was consecutive albums in Buck 65's case.

[EasilyConfused]

Not familiar with them/him Mark.
I loved 'Mutations' but 'Midnight Vultures' just didn't hit the spot and 'Sea Change' should have been Becks 'Blood on the Tracks' ....but wasn't. 'Guero'...getting back there...'The information' Bullseye! (Should have come after Odelay)

[stinkingpig]

On 3/22/07, EasilyConfused
<EasilyConfused.2nuskn1174578001 (AT) no-mx (DOT) forums.slimdevices.com> wrote:
>
> Not familiar with them/him Mark.
> I loved 'Mutations' but 'Midnight Vultures' just didn't hit the spot
> and 'Sea Change' should have been Becks 'Blood on the Tracks' ....but
> wasn't. 'Guero'...getting back there...'The information' Bullseye!
> (Should have come after Odelay)
>

Mutations is his only full album, as far as I'm concerned; everything
else has a few good singles held together with a lot of self-indulgent
dreck. Sea Change is the worst of the lot.

On topic, hero to zero move, I'm voting for The Sugar Cubes. Life's
Too Good was a great album, and I can't even remember the name of the
second one. It was bad enough that they resorted to filling in the
empty space with some outtakes from Life's Too Good.
--
"I spent all me tin with the ladies drinking gin,
So across the Western ocean I must wander" -- traditional

[Craig]

Alanis Morissette's Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie springs to mind instantly.

Craig

[drewe181]

Eels are pretty much like Beck. First album (beautiful freak)fantastic. Second and third great (electro shock blues, daisies of the galaxy). Fourth was not all that good (souljacker). fifth i haven't listened to that much. And there last studio album Blinking Lights was awesome again. Much like their concerts. I've seen them three times now and the first two shows were brilliant compared to their last show which was wrong venue for the music they were playing, wrong support band (smoosh) and just a boring gig all round.

[adamslim]

@drewe181: moving away from music, I reckon David Lynch has had as many comedowns as anyone - I think your avatar is from Eraserhead (?), which was genuinely disturbing but a great film; but what on earth was Wild At Heart? Dune? But then he came back with Mulholland Drive, and his latest looks, err, odd but cool...

Sorry, off topic, but Lynch films always are :)

Adam

[drewe181]

i think he makes up most of his movies on the spot as with the theory behind mullholand drive. the backers didn't waht to give him enough money for a series like he wanted so he had to cut it down for film format. i think his best was 'the elephant man'. a lot of time i can't be bothered with deconstructing a movie to find out what it 'really' means. after all it is supposed to be entertainment and i don't get paid to do so, so why bother. still, something can be said for his choice of music.

[amcluesent]

>hero to zero in the space of two albums <

Keane Hopes and Fears, then Under the Iron Sea. Barf.

Marillion Script for a Jester's tear then everything else reeked.

Peter Gabriel III, then whatever came next

Tracy Chapman, Tracy Chapman then whatever came next.

Beethoven, Symphony No. 5 then No. 6 wasn't so hot ;-)

[tyler_durden]

Morcheeba went from Big Calm to Fragments of Freedom. What a disaster!

TD

[CatBus]

I used to work at a record store that sold both new & used records. One trick about that business is that one week you're selling hundreds of copies of a CD new, and then a week later you're buying that same CD back used. This was way before CD burners existed, so people only sold them back when they didn't like them (or when they were stolen, but that's another story...).

So the game to play was: "When is this horrid pop album gonna crash?" And you had to be pretty good at it, because if you thought an album was still popular when it wasn't, you'd end buying back 500 used copies of Extreme II: Pornograffitti that you'd never be able to sell at any price.

There was a variant on this, which was guessing how well a follow-up album by a band with an inexplicably popular first album would do. Milli Vanilli was a pretty textbook example of the worst possible between-album crash in that regard. Another impressive (and less newsworthy) crater was left by the Spin Doctors. Pocket Full of Kryptonite had them headlining arena concerts, the next album had them playing cruise ships. Amazing.

A popular album followed by an unpopular album isn't quite the same thing as a good album followed by a bad album, I know. But it's measurable, and impressively so!