which album, since the beginning of time, has been the biggest disappointment for you. i mean you couldn't wait til it got released, you ran out on bought it the first day, you rushed home, tore off the shrink wrap (or opened the long box for you youngsters) took the phone off the hook, got a beverage or an ashtray, and sat down to listen, uninterrupted. and.......boom......it was terrible.......you couldn't believe just how bad it was. so disappointed.....(maybe the next song will be better....) then the questions: can i bring it back and say it skips? should i keep it for completist reasons? why did they do this to me? for me: CSNY - deja vu - live finally an electric live album that i had been waiting for since the CSNY2K tour album (that neil young stopped from ever getting released) what a horrible album. the neil young songs from 'living with war are even worse than the neil young versions (which are putrid in themselves) and the classics are so lifeless, so mundane, so terrible you wonder why they did this to themselves, let alone you.
Never been upset by the music but poor mastering has had the same effect. Queen's A night at the Opera springs to mind. Superb packaging, album is flat and silent but the sound is awful. Makes me an unhappy bunny
War On Drugs A Deeper Understanding - what a let down after Slave Ambient and Lost in the Dream when they were searching for their voice, found it, and then lost it big time with the new set which is grossly overproduced and the band buried in the mix along with Adam's voice and guitar. I've read where the vinyl overrides some of these issues.
Björk's Volta. I was so excited in the run up to its release and then it turned out to be Homogenic II - Electric Boogaloo only with brass instead of strings and a great empty space instead of songwriting. Declare Independence is an incredible backing track with a lyric that a 5 year old would say was too childish.
Zooropa...U2 were easily in my top five for a good four years or so up to the day it came out, and I was working fast food and living on a shoestring but I ran down to the one music store in the town I lived in at the time and snapped it up...and I think maybe I've listened to it all the way through three times in the 25 years since then. Here was the band I'd loved to death for being the antithesis of 80s synth-pop playing...80s synth-pop, and it wasn't even the 80s anymore.
REM - Out Of Time. I only had Document before and when I brought home OOT and listened to it, I was brutally disappointed. Terrible album imo.
Draw the Line was a step down from Rocks but still rocked....Night in the Ruts as the dealbreaker for me
Step down? After the run of Get Your Wings, Toys, and Rocks, that was a many stories drop from a cliff. Sorry, disagree.
Probably Joni Mitchell - Dog Eat Dog, which I bought on the strength of the single "Good Friends". I still think that's a fantastic song, and there are two or three other quite good songs on the album, but an awful lot of forgettable stuff. There is also a Byrds 5-album box set that I have mentioned elsewhere.I did not realise how different they became when they went "country". I consider there is barely one album's worth of good material (for my tastes) in the whole set.
I so much wanted to like this album (A Deeper Understanding).......in fact, I'm still trying to like this album. The production does it no favors.......I've considered buying the vinyl, but I'm afraid I'll spin it one time, shelve it, and go back to listening to Lost In The Dream.
This was the one I was going to say as well. They bounced back with AFTP, but for all purposes, the salad days were over.
One example is Neil Young's Are You Passionate. I was a big fan the years leading up, buying everything, and saw 1993 tour with Booker T and The MGs, the Euro 2001 Crazy Horse tour (both pretty great). So it took a while to sink in: This is a terrible album. Weak singing, weak, uninspired songwriting, wrong band. Has about 3 good songs, which would be Neil's batting average after this album, but I didn't know that in 2002.
i believe that 'american dream' suffered from everyone wanting 'deja vu II" and that just was never ever going to happen again.
This topic has been done many times before and my answer is almost always the same The Doobie Brothers "One Step Closer" As a longtime fan of this band (and YES, including the Michael McDonald years), I was hoping for a much, much better album, than what they finally delivered. The single "Real Love" came out many months earlier, with a picture sleeve of the forthcoming "One Step Closer" cover on it. Looking back, even though I really liked "Real Love" when it when first released, it is a bit of a turd song, even by Michael McDonald standards. The rest of that album was just a bunch of wasted energy in my opinion, as it was flat song wise and it provided nothing special musician wise. It took forever for them to release it and it was short with only 9 songs, one of which I was sick to death of by the time it showed up. Another album that I will clearly admit to have had really high hopes for, but it let me down terribly and that was the follow-up to Donald Fagen's brilliant "The Nightfly", that I always call, "Karmakuricrap". How Donald could go from making what I call the best Steely Dan album EVER, to this sci-fi filled drivel, is beyond me? I give kudos for "Tomorrow's Girls", but the fact that they left the albums sessions best cut on the flip-side of the single "Confide In Me", was plain stupid. To me, neither Donald or Walter ever fully recaptured that special "whatever it was that made us love them", on any release after "The Nightfly". I mean, sure there were some interesting tracks in the later years, but not one of them has that "staying power" that the earlier albums provided and they seem to me more like "padding" for my own wants and needs, when I get a little bored with their great stuff.
See...I was going to say Looking Forward...however there seems to be a running connection, and it seems CSN perform better without NY.
Amnesia - Cherry Night Time Flavor Brad Laner's first post-Medicine rock album. Just awful. I couldn't get rid of this soon enough.
The quintessential 'Smith album for me. I actually like this album a lot.....it was the first album in a while where Gene seems reasonably committed to the songwritting, and there is very little on it I dislike.
I have so many of these that deciding which was the biggest letdown would be a bitch. So, after looking over the previous examples here, I’ll just say Aerosmith’s Draw the Line is one of mine and R.E.M.’s Out of Time is not.