Albums that are one of the artist's worst, but contain one of their best songs

I will nominate Girls, Girls, Girls as their worst album (of the first 5 anyway). Wild Side is the only song I enjoy, but it is great.

 

Nirvana / Bleach / About a girl

 

Yes agreed. And even some of his less inspired albums from the last 20 years are fairly even; a dozen of okay tunes rather than one standout.

 

Hole is a great song too

 

Nah, Bleach is a fantastic album. Nirvana doesn't have a "worst" album.

 

INXS The Swing, not a bad album, but not their best either, 'cept for the totally sublime Johnson's Aeroplane.

 

Also Dirty Water and God Help Me. It might need a little trimming but otherwise is a great laid back record, it just wasnt Psychocandy 2 , so most people hated it.

 

Yellow Submarine - Hey Bulldog

 

How is that "clearly one of The Kinks worst albums"? And.. in which universe?

 

U2 - Stay (Faraway, So Close!), from the Zooropa album

 

I'm a huge fan of wacky chord and meter changes, thus I consider this to be among Cat Steven's best compositions. However, the rest of the album it comes from is completely forgettable:

 

Pretty much how I see it! A huge fan but it stopped with that album, but beautiful song.

 

"least best" category:
Steely Dan's Everything Must Go --> PIXELEEN

 

U2's How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb : A Man And A Woman

I've mellowed a bit about the album - now I really like the rockers - but it still ranks among my least favorite U2 and I still love this song.

 

Errrr.... I'm no U2 fan but I think "Zooropa" is one of their best albums.

 

It makes sense that someone who is not a U2 fan would enjoy Zooropa, because it doesn't sound like a U2 album (other than "Stay"). I have been a U2 fan ever since they broke through with the War album in '83, and Zooropa was very off-putting to me when it was released ('93), especially coming on the heels of Achtung Baby, which I think is one of the band's best. Over the nearly 25 years (!) since Zooropa came out, I have developed a taste for some of the genres that U2 was experimenting with on that album, but I definitely didn't want to hear them from U2 back then, and I have never given the record much of a second chance. Maybe I'll reach back and give it another shot soon.

 

Agreed. I love it.

 

Yet it is ignored on every Genesis greatest hits/best of compilation. Never understood the lack of love for this song. It was a top 50 hit in the U.S.

 

I suspect my love for that song is preserved by the fact that I don't hear it (as I do That's All) every week or more on some soft rock channel/supermarket/diner, etc.

 

The Who - Who Are You

 

Wayne Newton's Daddy Don't You Walk So Fast album is a desultory mess of cover songs that don't hang together well at all, but I've always had a strange fondness for the hit title song. Like so many other albums by artists of his ilk, the hit is surrounded with filler. That's why God created 45s.

 

I love Smiley Smile. Sure, it was a compromised remnant of what Smile would have been, but it's charming in its quirkiness. "Little Pad" and "She's Goin' Bald" are madcap gems, and I personally prefer the free-form version of "Wind Chimes" to the more rhythmically structured version that finally came out on Smile. Most of the album has very sparse instrumentation, but except for "Good Vibrations" and "Heroes and Villains", the Beach Boys played most of the instruments themselves. It was a bold step and I've never heard another album quite like it. It was actually one of the weirdest and most experimental albums of 1967, and no one can say that was easy to pull off in that highly experimental year.

 

Perfect Water is one of the best post-Albert Bouchard BOC tracks, IMO. Other than that one, Ruins and White Flags, I find Ninja pretty weak, so works for me.

 

Hmm.."Tonight" from Blue Moves is a great song.

 

Or as one cartoonist put it: