THE TOP TEN WORST ALBUMS OF 2023

 

 

Welcome back my friends
To the show that never ends
We’ve got bad; we’ve got Meh
Come inside, come inside

 

A funny thing happened when making this list.  I found more to like about every album (except one) in my Bottom Ten.  Hell, I even yeeted four albums straight past the Meh into the Okay Tier when trying to write about them (you’ll get to know which ones on the Best Of list).  There was even an overachiever that struck “Pretty Good”; complete 180.  God help me, I even might sort of understand the appeal of Young Thug finally (spoilers, I guess).

But none of the albums here are ones I liked.  They might have something I could appreciate, but each of these projects falls short on some front.  A few of them on many fronts.  So let’s explore why.  That’s what this blog is here to do after all, explore and express the things from inside my head.

If you’re new here, here’s how it works: When I do Year End Lists, I put down every album I listened to and break them into Tiers: The Bottom Ten, Meh, Okay, Pretty Good, Honorable Mentions and The Top Twenty.  This blog will be the “Meh” and “Bottom Ten” sections.  The Meh albums will have brief notes about some of them (but not all, because there’s 55).  Let’s take a look:

THE MEH TIER

Aby Wolf “Dream Fruit”
Alton Allen "We Might Not Be Friends After This"

April March "April March Meets Staplin"

Ashnikko "Weedkiller"

Black Belt Eagle Scout “The Land, The Wind, The Sky”
Black Tiger Sex Machine “Portals”
Busta Rhymes “Blockbusta”
Candlebox "The Long Goodbye"

Cavalera Conspiracy "Morbid Visions"

Cavalera Conspiracy "Bestial Devastation"

Christine and the Queens "Paranoïa, Angels, True Love"

Clark "Sus Dog"

Currents "The Death We Seek"

Danny Brown “Quaranta”
Dave Matthews Band "Walk Around The Moon"

Death Grips "Electronic Drum Solo Dub Mix"

Dolly Parton “Rockstar”
Fall Out Boy "So Much (For) Stardust"

Fever Ray "Radical Romantics"

For The Fallen Dreams

Gabrielle Aplin "Phosphorescent"

Gorillaz "Cracker Island"

Goyard Ibn Said & Ghais Guevara "Goyard Comin': Exordium (Deluxe)"

The Guess Who "Plein D'Amour"

Gyrofield "Stimulus"

Hoshimachi Suesei "Specter"

Host “IX”
In Flames "Foregone"

Janelle Monae "The Age Of Pleasure"

The Japanese House "In The End It Always Does"

The Jonas Brothers "The Album"

L’Rain “I Killed Your Dog”
Lance Skiiiwalker “Audiodidactic”
Mac DeMarco "Five Easy Hot Dogs"

Metallica "72 Seasons"

Metaroom "Oxidized Archive"

MSPAINT "Post-American"

Nellie McKay "Hey Guys, Watch This"

NF "Hope"

Nothing But Thieves "Dead Club City"

Onyx "Blood On Da X "

Psychedelic Porn Crumpets “Fronzoli”
Pupil Slicer "Blossom"

Redveil "Playing w/ Fire"

Roisin Murphy "Hit Parade"

Scar Symmetry “The Singularity: Phase II-Xenotaph”
Semisonic “Little Bit Of Sun”
The Sherlocks "People Like Me & You"

Skrillex "Don't Get Too Close"

St. Paul & The Broken Bones “Angels In Science Fiction”
T-Pain "On Top Of The Covers"

Toro Y Moi "Sandhills"

Veil Of Maya "[m]other"

X-Ray Dog "A Tail Of Two Cities"

Y La Bamba "Lucha"

• Black Belt Eagle Scout would’ve made the Bottom Tier if I hadn’t given it a third chance.  It finally clicked for me, I understood where it was coming from (and I got used to her voice), but it still wasn’t my cup of tea.  
• Blockbusta is better than E.L.E. 2, but still feels about six years out of date.
• The two Cavalera Conspiracy re-recordings of early Sepultura albums did make the production more polished, and that was the whole problem.  They feel too sanitized now.  (And now that you can hear what most of Morbid Visions sounds like, the songs are weeeeak.)
• I liked the Paranoia section of Paranoia, Angels, True Love, but Angels lost me completely.  It’s a shame Madonna does her best work in over 20 years on this album because you don’t get to most of it until the boring slog that is the back 2/3rds.
• I was with the Dolly Parton album at first, but holy crap 30 songs and 2 hours, 21 minutes is not acceptable for a rock covers album.  It’s above karaoke quality, but none of it’s good necessarily; just good enough.  I could probably fuck with 13 of these tracks, but that’s less than half.  (And that’s with both living Beatles on “Let It Be”, a full song cover of “Stairway To Heaven” with Lizzo and a full band, full length cover of “Freebird” to close.  And those are some of the skips!)
• I realize now that I fell off Gorillaz halfway through Plastic Beach and I’ve been waiting for a time to get back on with them that will never come.
• If not for some of the verses being pretty good, Goyard Comin’ would’ve made the Bottom Ten for the terrible interludes alone.
• The Guess Who hasn’t had an original member since 2016 and the next most veteran member joined in 2008.  This is easy listening pablum that has no claim to the lineage (which is why they’re getting sued).
• I’m happy for Janelle Monae to go chase their bliss, but this album was too boring to be a vibe.
• Was The Japanese House always the Caroline Polachek we had at home?
• That Jonas Brothers album was much better than it had any right to be.  It still kinda sucked, but that “kinda” sort of worries me…
• Lance Skiiiwalker was a lock for “Worst Of” for most of the year until I realized it’s mostly whatever and not really bad.  It’s the interlude in the middle where he talks about sampling for what feels like forever that just turned me off and made me turn the album off.
• Time comes for us all.  And realizing time came for Metallica and made them Meh-tallica over a decade ago was no fun to finally realize.
• Every time I listen to Oxidized Archive, it gets one step closer to breaking through to the Okay Tier.  Maybe a couple more pushes would do it.  (It’s probably the best album in Meh.)
• Dead Club City was super disappointing.  The single (and lead-off track) slapped so hard, and the rest of the album was dance club tapioca that’d gone a bit off.
• That Psychedelic Porn Crumpets album was this close to getting into the Bottom.  It was frustrating to listen to.
• Redveil has shown promise on features, but this EP is basic as fuck.
• T-Pain’s album is at least interesting.  He needs better production, but this could’ve been something.
• Check out the title track to Veil Of Maya’s [m]other If you haven’t already.  It’s pretty good.

DISHONORABLE MENTION

 

 

Pop Evil "Skeletons" 

This goes from being a peppy but cliché hard rock radio thing to Theory Of A Deadman after track 3.  That’s when they’re not busy ripping off Bring Me The Horizon and sanding off the edges of their later period, already polished material.  I liked their last album, shit I even liked “Eye Of The Storm” from this one.  What happened?

THE BOTTOM TEN

10. AJR "The Maybe Man"

I never thought I'd be disappointed by an AJR album, but here we are.  Some of the singles in the leadup showed a little progress, maybe a smidge more maturity, but the album is purile central.  It revels in its backsliding, displaying a self-awareness that makes everything worse.  If you tell me to my face this Toys-R-Us kid shit is a coping mechanism, that doesn't make it okay for you to keep acting like that.  The DJ Is Crying For Help for a reason.  Get some.

 

 

9. Zulu “A New Tomorrow”

This project isn’t necessarily bad.  I don’t dislike the concept in theory: genre has been a four letter word for me since at least 2001.  The music is even well played.  But the stylistic whiplash is far too stark; none of this shit makes any goddam sense.  There’s no flow at all.  It’s just a bunch of metalcore slammed against a bunch of neo soul with no bridge.  It was really annoying.  If this band figures out how to blend their two disparate elements somehow, they could be a force to be reckoned with, but for now it’s just a headache.

 

 

8. Earl Sweatshirt & The Alchemist "Voir Dire"

This is the first time I’ve actually sat down and listened to Earl Sweatshirt (something I’d sworn I’d done before) and…is he always this monotonous?  It isn’t even any individual song; if I heard any of them in isolation, I think I might fuck with it, but strung together his flow is just too similar; it feels like an unending drone.  It’s only 26 minutes, but it ran through my patience in half that.

 

 

7. Young Thug "Business Is Business"

The title is fitting because it sounds like something he had to throw together to fund his legal team.  Actually reminds me a lot of Drake’s For All The Dogs, like they had the same cadre of producers.  Except, y’know, the dime store version of it because this was thrown together.

(Addendum: I can’t help but notice on the Drake album there’s an automated voice message from a Mercedes Benz dealership and on this there’s a collect call from Young Thug from prison on the song he did with Drake.  That’s a depressing juxtaposition, isn’t it?)

 

 

6. Owl City "Coco Moon"

Twee beyond description.  Cloying enough to melt your teeth to absolute niability.  Coco Moon is so saccharine it makes AJR sound like Queens Of The Stone Age.  On top of that, every song is twice as long as it should be, and that’s in spite of being stories with pretty literal lyrics.  You could cut half of all of them, lyrics and all and lose nothing.  Doesn’t help that they all sound really similar; I can’t tell anything after track one apart from the rest (that one made me smile in spite of myself, dorky as it is).

 

 

5. Dave Lombardo "Rites Of Percussion"

This starts out having some cool drum fills backed up by percussion beds.  Then it keeps doing that.  By track 6, I was still unsure if I should put this in the Worst Of, then of course I realized it was track 6 and this was only half over.  That sealed it.  Look, I’ve been a drummer in one form or another since 1992 and even I thought this was a waste of time.

 

 

 

4. Lil Uzi Vert "Pink Tape"  
 

Eighty seven minutes of mostly the same song over and over again.  Track two whips ass, but after that everything blurs together until you hit Nicki Minaj’s worst verse of all time.  “Just Wanna Rock” is at least different, but it’s like Uzi’s complaining that they can’t rock, but they waaaanaaaaa.  I guess they get their wish, because there’s an infamous cover of “Chop Suey”, a random Bring Me The Horizon song mislabled as an Uzi Vert song and a Babymetal song which, y’know, same.

Uzi is frustrating because they’re aesthetically unique, there’s clearly some kind of vision there, but it’s all still just bitches, money and drugs.  And the same rage-y trap sludge for most of the runtime with a few clever ideas buried in the back half.  I wanted to like this, I swear.

 

 

3. Fake Type “Fake Swing 2”

Electro swing is like Lucha Libre: it can be a lot of fun when it’s done well, but when done poorly WOOF.  Every.  Single.  Song.  Is electro swing with trap injections, yelling in a KOOOOOOKY VOICE, and a key change up in the last chorus.  Demondice’s guest verse is the best part of this album, and I can’t stand Demondice.  Obnoxious and repetitive.

 

 

2. Drake “For All The Dogs”

I’ve written about this one extensively already, so I’m gonna bring up something I’ve thought of since:

Why did he take a jab at Esperanza Spalding?  It’s because he’s petty (duh), but more specifically, why now?  His “beef” with her stems from Spalding winning the Best New Artist Grammy over Drake in 2010.  Does he wish he’d won instead because he wanted to be taken by the Best New Artist Curse and be freed from the prison of fame?  Is he looking back at his life and lamenting what could have been if he'd just gotten in and gotten out?  We may never know…

 

 

1. Roger Waters “Dark Side fuck you I’m not typing it”

It’s not just how bad the album is, it’s the reasons for making it.  It’s the context.  It’s the person behind it and what they’re up to now.  It’s also the what-the-fuckery of doing this to not only your own most prized work, not only doing it to one of the most beloved albums of all time, but being deluded enough to think you really did something special here.  Make no mistake, Roger Waters thinks this is some kind of artistic statement.  He’s full of himself enough for this to be more than some not-so-elaborate troll.  

Yes, someone made a worse Pink Floyd album than Doug Walker’s The Wall.  And it was the guy who made The Wall in the first place.


And that’s that.  What albums did you think were bad or disappointing this year?  Let me know in the comments.  Or get at me on Mastodon.  Or get at me on BlueSky (also get at me if you want an invite code; I've got five I can't seem to get rid of).  I ain’t too hard to find.  Next up is The Top 20 Songs Of 2023!

Stay safe out there.