2022 Worst ALBUMS

Seventy-year-old millionaires should not be allowed to make records (Bruce Springsteen is the exception to this rule). This album is an unnecessary mess and I say this as a person who has held a flame the Jethro Tull for many a decade. There is no bounce and there is no fizz. What we instead get is insipid banality. I think is meant to be worthy and cerebral but instead, it just comes across as really rather dull.

Looking back, Papa Roach is not a newcomer to my least favoured albums of the year list. This is probably unsurprising as they reside in probably my least favourite genre, white rappers. It feels false, it feels forced and it feels incredibly synthetic.

In terms of pissing on your own legacy, Christian death are absolute masters. The original version of this band was probably one of the most important acts in the evolution of alternative and extreme music. You can trace Goth, death metal, and black metal back to their seminal debut album “Only Theatre of Pain”. However, since 1985 they have been a culturally bankrupt façade of their counterculture initial incarnation. Valor Kand has led a weak facsimile of the original band with a revolving door of bit part-playing co-contributors. This is another in a long line of really bad albums and it is laughable that they have spent the last thirty-odd years trading on essentially six years of brilliance.

More white boy rapping but here there is the additional cardinal sin of trying and failing to spectacularly bandwagon jump. Mr. Kelly seems to have delusions of grandeur and views himself in the same sphere as the offspring or Instead, we get a horrendously and hideously sanitized version of pop punk. All the sharp edges and antagonism has been very carefully filed away and instead it is all danger with the safety valve very much on. The title is meant to be post-modern and ironic but instead is actually very apt description of what is a horrible record.

If you are to go down the gimmick route you need to have the musical chops to back it up. This is meant to be traditional heavy metal with all the theatrical trappings intact. However, what it does come across as is a dull and repetitive re-tread of roads that have been traveled many times before. There is not a single spark of originality to be found here.

Completely pointless album from the voice of Heart. This is a half-hearted (pardon the pun) mess of originals and covers that really has no reason to exist. Sounds like a taxi is waiting downstairs and she dialing in her performance before she can disappear into the night. For someone who possesses such a magnificent voice is woefully underused here.

I hate dull music. For me, music is an art form, and it is meant to elicit a reaction. That reaction might be one of adoration or that reaction might be one of revulsion. But what is not meant to do is make you feel nothing. This album was so unassuming and un-invigorating that when I came to the end of it, I didn’t feel I like I had listened to anything, and I couldn’t remember a single notable thing about it. It had no highs, it had no lows, it was just there. It was the absolute encapsulation of an offensive middle-of-the-road and ironically in being so un-offensive it managed to utterly offend me.

There is a level of quality control needed when looking at Megadeth’s discography. There is the raw and rancid early years and then there are the slick commercial days of the 90s. This is then followed by 10 years of abysmal records before our Dave finds his mojo again with 2009’s “Endgame”. Since then, he has made some all-right albums that seem to contain an intriguing mix of standout tracks and an awful lot of filler. Sadly with “The sick, the dying….. And the dead!” They seem to have forgotten to include any of the former and instead we get twelve pieces of trash by numbers, none of which ever seemed to get out of second gear.

What is the point of safe alt-rock? There is no danger here. There is no aggression and there is no energy. This isn’t even rock music for people who don’t like rock music, this is rock music produced by those who once read a book about what Rock should sound like.

I adore power metal. I love its bombastic nature and its sumptuous mix of melody and absurdity. Ashes of Ares seem to have forgotten that it is meant to be about memorable tunes that absorb your soul. This is just big choruses without any of the flair or creativity.

Absolute metal by numbers. I have heard every track done before and done better by better groups. It lacks any myriad of creativity and just seems to re-tread musical highways that are already chock full of vacuous imitators.

It’s all famine and feast with Coheed and Cambria. The two Afterman albums were excellent but “The Color Before the Sun”, their only release to deter from their self-created si-fi universe, was awful. 2018’s Vaxis Act 1 was a glorious return to form, but the second part sees them once again plunge into a spiral of maudlin self-replication. This is a rehash of what they have done before but just not as emotive and not as good.

This is Death Metal with all the bits that make it Death Metal removed. 2019’s “Hidden History of the Human Race”, was a piece of utter genius. Gorgeous collusion of sixties psychedelic and ferocious blood-curdling Death Metal. With “Timewave Zero”, Blood Incarnation wander off into an ambient world and drop the ball completely. They haven’t even had the good grace to replace the death Metal with good ambient. This is just boring drivel.

I do feel bad giving this album a kicking as it was released in the wake of bassist Tim Feerick's death and the departure of (admist sexual assault allegations) clean vocalist Tilian Pearson. But I just can’t help myself as this is the utter definition of going through the motions. It just feels stale and uninspired. Everything here has been done before. It is unoriginal and just creativity bankrupt.

I’m old, therefore I can recall a time when the Red Hot chili Peppers were the most exciting band on earth. “Mother’s Milk” sounded like nothing I had heard before and to these young ears it was the sound of musical templates being upturned and ignored. Somewhere along the way, as they have become a stadium act, they have lost that revolutionary sass and become a bland purveyor of safe pop rock. This album does them no favours in that it feels like it was created in a test tube with a formulaic approach to dance rock. Everything is based on a template and there is no feel of any of the urgency or fun that made them so alluring at the start of their career.

This is one of those albums that I just didn’t get. Kerrang and other publications raved about it but to these aged ears it sounded repetitive, subdued, and lacking in any real depth or passion. Everything felt synthetic and forced and lacking in any level of genuality.

There is nothing worse than badly done metal. It really annoys me that there are some bands who think it is just a case of being a bit noisy and being a bit shouty and regurgitating what others have done before. To many in the outside world, it may well all sound the same and there may be a lack of subtlety and variance. But the point is that metal currently is a marvellously varied ecosystem of different approaches. And then you get something like this. Which is horrendous and backward-looking and just gives the whole thing a bad name. Every song sounds the same and every song lacks any level of ingenuity or originality. This my friends is metal done badly, very very badly.

There is beauty in imperfection. Not everything needs to be perfect and not everything needs to be polished until it loses all its unique qualities. This album has been overproduced into oblivion. Everything has been overdubbed and fiddled with until it loses anything that makes it feel organic or real. It’s so sugary and sweet that I felt in danger of falling into a diabetic coma halfway through.

Def Leppard of the Masters of big stadium rock tracks, fist-pounding choruses, and repetitive verses designed for a hundred thousand voices to sing as one. For decades they have with ruthless efficiency combined stupidity with commerciality. So why the hell they suddenly decided to go serious on us here? It takes a good six tracks for “Diamond Star Halos” to even get out of neutral never mind engaging itself into first gear. Those anthemic anthems are all missing in action. Forty years into their career Def Leppard has suddenly decided to become serious and nuanced and it just doesn’t work. I may be an unashamed woke Guardian reader but by the end of this album I was absolutely aching for the cheap chauvinism of prime-time 80’s Leppard.

Of late indie stalwarts Belle and Sebastian have been having quite an identity crisis. In 2015 they produce a stunning slice of free-form indie dance in the shape of “Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance”. It didn’t sound at all like Belle and Sebastian and was all the better for that. However, you got the feeling that they developed cold feet at the idea of moving too far from the quaint indie bedwetting roots and their next move was to create three quite wretched EP that were a hotchpotch of ideas. Unsuccessfully blending the unashamed dancefloor-orientated feel of Peacetime with the much more meat-and-potato approach of their earlier work.

“A Bit of Previous” does exactly what it says on the tin by trying to return the band to their heyday of twee socially inept vignettes of Love’s labors Lost. Sadly, they miss their mark quite spectacularly by basing their approach on the universally derided “Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant” as opposed to the magnificence of “The Boy with the Arab Strap”. Basically, it’s an album full of not-very-good 90s Belle and Sebastian.

The joke is not funny anymore. Please stop.

The write up for this album promised passionate soundscapes. Actually, what it does serve up is insipid and dull variations of stuff that’s been done hundred times before. They are trying hard but there is nothing here to make the album feel anything more than a cheap copy of stuff done far better elsewhere.

You may recognize this lot as they represented Finland at last year’s Eurovision Song contest. They were the ones who felt like a collision between Limp Bizkit and Linkin Park. I would love to say that I had my preconceptions smashed and that they have produced an era-defining masterpiece that rejuvenated nu-metal. But sadly, what they are thrown together is a mess of contradictory sounds that just sounds like a focus meeting gone horribly wrong. It’s a smorgasbord of different metal genres with no thought about how the different styles will fit and be glued together. Just a mess from start to finish.

The fact that this is Five Finger Death Punch’s ninth album proves that there is indeed something amiss with the world. The truth is though that they have simply recorded the same album nine times, as there is no variance here from their previous releases. This is all toxic masculinity put to banal repetitive music. It’s every stereotype that metal has desperately tried to shed, personified in a record. There is so much creativity in modern metal that it actually affronts me that it is albums like this that are the ones that get the promotional oxygen, just plain awful.

There are plenty more albums that I hated but that’s enough for now. If I’ve slagged off something or someone that you love, then sorry but that’s the beauty of doing this is it all subjective. One person’s enormous failure is another one’s godlike icon. Anyway, the also-rans are next, which are the ones where I will be a little bit nicer but won’t start throwing out superlatives just yet.