Top 10 Worst Albums of 2017 - Ricky Lai

Watch the video version of this list here.

The title explains it all, but just to ensure we know what we’re dealing with here, let’s see that title again.

Top 10 Worst Albums of 2017

Slick.

#10: Arcade Fire – Everything Now
Alternative Dance, Dance Pop

This album hurts. It really does. I had no inherent dislike of famed indie collective Arcade Fire diving into the dance pop pool, because while Reflektor was a polarising record I figured that it showed enough creativity and potential for a better stab at this sound in the future.

On Everything Now, however, there are enough half-baked, mediocre, genuinely grating ideas for the album to become their worst effort yet; an obnoxious and vapid dance pop record trying to comment on the information overload of the digital age, but instead falling short and writing corny, unsubtle lyrics. The same band that wrote:

“My body is a cage that keeps me,
From dancing with the one I love,
But my mind holds the key.”

…is now writing:

“You got the money and I got the time,
I got a secret that’ll make you mine.”

The title track isn’t too bad and neither is the one after it, sounding like a Lion King-themed disco and a !!! cover respectively, but after this the album trips and nosedives into a slew of badly strung-together ideas. Any emotional buzz you thought you could get from a Win Butler and Regine Chassagne duo is washed away on a goofy, dub-inspired cut called “Chemistry” where none of it is to be found, a hugely distorted and repetitive track called “Infinite Content” that ironically I wanted to end within seconds, and mixing on “Electric Blue” cloudier than a hangover piss.

Don’t even get me started on their approach towards the topics of self-harm and self-esteem on “Creature Comfort” entirely lacking in taste and subtlety (“Assisted suicide / She dreams about dying all the time”), then with the self-congratulatory lyric about having “filled up the bathtub and put on our first record”. There’s a lack of integrity there, too.

#9: The Chainsmokers – Memories… Do Not Open
Electro-Pop

It is no secret that The Chainsmokers are one of the least creative acts in popular music right now. I like to stay optimistic about popular music in the mainstream right now, but… goodness… this sure doesn’t help its case.

The duo paste together tedious, pasty, un-fun dance songs with lazy melodies and sappy lyrics which try to derive emotion out of random place names and inanimate objects that hopefully the listeners can relate to.

It’s sad, because… it sounds like they tried to create something emotionally potent on this release. I guess the task was too much for our two protags to handle, as the music ended up sounding flatter than ever.

#8: Ghost Bath – Starmourner
“Black Metal”, Post-Rock

A bootleg F-Zero soundtrack. No kidding.

There are cuts here where the blaring guitars don’t even match up with the blast beats, the vocal wailing is… I’m certain it’s only wailing. I know black metal isn’t renowned for coherent vocals, but the vocalist of Ghost Bath is definitely just wailing obnoxiously as if it were a parody.

The little instrumental interludes (one can be found at the end) sound like MIDI files produced from a Casio keyboard or something. It sounds more like a high-school music composition assignment than an album release on a commercial label! I feel as if even non-metal fans could listen to this and recognise that something sounds a bit off.

#7: Macklemore – Gemini
Pop Rap

Macklemore detached from producer Ryan Lewis to take his own lead, and unfortunately it revealed more weaknesses about the rapper’s music than ever before. Running over an hour in length, this album even needs to invite guest artists on almost every track to hold itself, as what Macklemore himself offers is flimsy and corny.

There are two big issues:

1. Macklemore is making you cringe from hilariously awful lyrics like “I wanna be a feminist, but I wanna watch porno”, “Got a Guns N Roses t-shirt, and never listened to the band / Just being honest, I just thought that shit looked cool” and the multiple references to Geico (yes, multiple), all of which add nothing of relation to the song at hand (making their inclusion all the more perplexing).

2.     2. Macklemore is pulling straight from other artists’ sounds and styles, from blatant copy-pastes of Chance the Rapper’s Coloring Book, D.R.A.M.’s “Broccoli” (which even features Lil Yachty), and the many trap rap cuts that take after Migos. Macklemore rides trends like a tricycle.

It is funny to hear Macklemore scream “Bitch, I’m Willy Wonka!” in the hopes of seeming epic and intimidating, though.

#6: Joan of Arc – He’s Got the Whole This Land Is Your Land In Your Hands
Experimental Rock, Art Rock, Art Pop, Indietronica

This album is the worst result of that indie ‘let’s try to be absurd and artsy’ attitude, and with the worst track placed right at the beginning, one could realise this right out of the gate, too.

I’d like to think of this as the Adult Jazz – Earrings Off! of this year – a concoction of clashing sounds that try to sound coherent together but cannot simply because… there are just sounds out there that will not mesh together pleasantly.

Either the album is giving you sour combos of noise, or it is being an absolute slog to listen through. Believe me, once the rush of the first track or so is over, this thing simply beomes brittle, pungent and boring.

#5: AJR – The Click
Electro-Pop

This wasn’t the worst thing I heard all year, but it was one of the most insulting.

To think that all the lyrical content here is what young teenagers in the modern age are apparently all into. You have tracks here raving about getting emotionally attached to characters from Netflix shows (explicitly, a song is called “Netflix Trip” and obsesses over The Office), tracks about struggling that take on a dangerously apathetic attitude as if one is meant to accept weakness and not act on it (“Well, I’m weak! What’s wrong with that?”), and all over are cuts that, instrumentally, try to replicate Jon Bellion’s quirky, off-kilter pop production but has little semblance of forming a coherent groove or beat with it. Such results in one of the most ear-grating intro tracks I’ve heard all year, or some songs where the trio bring focus to some widely discussed song topics like drinking parties, or smoking marijuana.

The issue, is that AJR are so honed in on being ‘the good guys’ that they only end up boasting about how much more genuine and likeable they apparently are compared to other mainstream pop artists, instead of adding anything productive or nuanced to the discussion. It’s an album that tries to seem smarter than the average, and is convinced of its own uniqueness and likeability, but in actuality, has very little substance on its own.

Also, their screechy hooks are the worst.

#4: Lil Pump – Lil Pump
Trap Rap, Pop Rap

Florida trap rap viral sensation and former Harvard scholar Lil Pump made waves on the Internet with hilariously vapid singles that weren’t to be taken too seriously. They were just a ridiculous, obnoxious time.

Lil Pump soon put out a full mixtape full of more songs like “D Rose” and “Gucci Gang”, and while I expected them to be repetitive and grating (that does seem to be his shtick), the one pattern to Pump’s music got old really fast, making the entire track listing become tiresome to listen through.

Pump repeats titular catchphrases as if he’s channelling his past career in studying for a biochemical exam and repeating notes back to himself again and again to remember them better.

It’s a real bummer because I can totally see the fun popping up with this mixtape, but that is barely an excuse when the fun dies down within ten seconds after realising what a track’s main catchphrase will be.

It’s really bad and I gave it a scathing review, but it’s barely the worst of the year in retrospect because I can at least derive some playful enjoyment out of a song like “Gucci Gang” because it is so ridiculously dumb. The next three albums lack this quality.

#3: Jake Paul & Team 10 – Litmas EP

Pop Rap…?

Honestly.

Who thought this was going to be good?

Like, for real.

Actually.

#2: If I Could Kill Myself – Ballad of the Broken

Depressive Black Metal

Amazingly, that Ghost Bath album wasn’t the last metal album to appear here, and yet more amazingly, not the last album from a Ghost Bath member.

Yep.

Again, I think even those unfamiliar with black metal, or metal in general, would be able to recognise the deepest issues with this unusual unsettling release.

Not that it’s unsettling in its mood, although considering its subject matter it could be. It’s unsettling in existence – I don’t quite understand the drive behind it.

To get the sonically obvious out of the way, the production is terrible. There are instrumentals that sound completely out of field, plus the composition work in general sounds like a big mess.

I think the vocals, much like Ghost Bath, are also a big part of what makes this album unbearable to listen to. They’re what makes Ballad of the Broken sound like a mere parody of black metal, as if Bart Baker listened to Burzum. At times they sound as if the vocalist is recording them late at night so they can’t be too loud or they’ll wake up their parents. Which would be very unfortunate for the frontman of a black metal project.

My biggest issue is that these all make the suicide-themed concept of the album seem so much more tasteless. I am aware that depressive, suicidal black metal is an actual thing, but this is an example lacking purely in taste for its subject matter. Blatantly titling it as such and giving it cover artwork like such could’ve been to emotionally ‘shock’ the audience, maybe? But the actual music is so badly done and no minute of the dungeon synth or black metal or noise or ambient cuts is well-executed, so… ergh.

#1: Chris Brown – Heartbreak On A Full Moon
Dance Pop, Alternative R&B, Pop Rap

Almost three hours of Chris Brown? I can barely make it through three minutes.

“Privacy” was one of the worst songs of the year, but it was only the tip of a very bloated and yucky iceberg, where Chris Brown attempts to get sexual over generic dancehall-inspired pop beats. The 45 tracks on this thing are as patience-testing as you could ever expect. Not that the long run-time alone is an issue, but the combination of that and the severe lack of anything remotely good.

If we wanted to talk technical issues with the music and production, Chris Brown’s singing meanders with little in the way of melody at all, and when backed by multiple layers of background vocals this becomes a mess that is hard to keep track of.

Who asked for 45 new Chris Brown songs to be bulldozed in at once? Who?

Mind you, this could be a very biased decision. For the longest time, Chris Brown’s continuous presence in the mainstream has been one of the most infuriating things to me, and as if this had not been irritating enough, he includes R. Kelly on a track. R. Kelly. Yes, that R. Kelly.

Still, I guess the anger comes in handy when I need to open jars and stuff like that.