Top 10 Worst Albums of 2018 - Ricky Lai

Tory Lanez - Memories Don't Die

Ah, it’s the last month of 2018! You know what that means, another flurry of worst music of the year lists from self-proclaimed pop culture commentators on the Internet. By doing a list of my own it seems that I’m now ins with the group, hopefully we can all go out and play air hockey together. I’d much rather be talking about albums that succeeded in what they do, but before that happens I’m going to have to scold a few for misbehaving because on your musical journeys you eventually come across something that you can call unspeakably bad, which ironically I’m spending time in this write-up speaking about.

I don’t always go out of my way to listen to bad music, so while I tried not to pick anything controversial for this video, this list will only feature albums that I bothered to listen to in full, so fascist stoner metal, the angry braided white boy and the demo scraps of hip-hop’s favourite woman-beater won’t be given much spotlight and I’m sure that this disappoints absolutely nobody.

Feel free to watch the video version of this list here.


#10: The Smashing Pumpkins – Shiny And Oh So Bright Vol. 1 / LP: No Past. No Future. No Sun
(Napalm)
Alternative Rock

All possible gags about Billy Corgan being a complete human enigma aside, alternative rock icons The Smashing Pumpkins seem to still be able to release material, only this time none of it good at all – throwing strings onto milquetoast rock songs written they played a game of Madlibs and called it a day.


The big offender is the production. This isn’t even mixed properly and I wouldn’t have minded nearly as much if it were a band finding their ground on their own, but this is literally The Smashing Pumpkins. It sounds nitpicky that of all things I’d be criticising the mixing but that’s the thing – you know it must be woeful if it’s that noticeable above the sound of Corgan’s voice sounding like a gremlin eating kimchi. Said voice is drowning in a whirlwind of orchestral mash and guitars riddled with bullet wounds from their service during the loudness wars.


#9: Vance Joy – Nation of Two
(Warner Bros.)
Folk Pop

There seems to be a notable market for strumming a ukelele to tried-and-true chord progressions, writing a twee pop song and then plastering strings and tambourines over the top to sound cute and very easy to cover. It’s called music for mobile data plan commercials, or Vance Joy as I’d like to formally address.

Although their hit song “Riptide” is a neat contender for victor in the contest of “pick up a ukelele and write the dullest possible song you can with it” competition, I can see why it’s stirred up a lot of passive love, because it’s very easy to like. It straddles the barest standards for it to even be considered a song. So I can see why their new album Nation of Two might strike a chord with listeners, mainly because the chords they strike are generally agreed upon as being nice to listen to. But when you milk that for thirteen tracks, I start to get a little bit suspicious.

Nation of Two isn’t offensively bad, in fact, it’s more inoffensively bad than anything else. Sticking to the same formula of strings and folk instrumentation is a safe port of call but it’s so sanitised and lacking that it cleans up any chance of finding a string of human connection here; cementing over any smidge of emotional honesty they might’ve wanted to keep. It’s like trying to satisfy your umami tastebuds by licking a breezeblock.


#8: Thirty Seconds to Mars – America
(Interscope)
Electropop, Pop Rock, Trap [EDM]

For as much as you could wince listening to a Thirty Seconds to Mars song, they would at least have aimed to sound huge and epic, even if said attempts to sound huge and epic really might end up reaching the same heights as a punctured bottle rocket propelled into the air by the breathy squeals of a mating turtle. I didn’t find them horrendous, is what I’m saying, just melodramatic to a fault, although that fault may as well have been the San Andreas fault.

In futile attempts to be topical and create a sparkling social commentary on this year’s parodious episode of the United States, Thirty Seconds to Mars decided to call their new album America, and it suits, because like America, it’s nowhere near as impressive as it is thinks it is. Throw this one on the pile of rinse-and-repeat commentary alongside a shift towards a mainstream electro-pop sound to get big radio plays. You could congratulate them for giving this social consciousness a go, but I won’t, because whatever attempt there was to address anything topical is so vague that it renders the entire aesthetic completely purposeless, choosing mainly to stumble back into the isolated bedroom of vaguely angsty phrases that XXXTentacion might have scribbled on the back of his diary.

All of that said, the most offensive thing this album did was let Jared Leto back near a microphone again.

Perhaps you could get a laugh out of the online generator that allows you to create your own personalised variations of the cover artwork, and while I’m sure that virality played into their hands, I certainly had a lot of fun making them, so there’s something there. I still won’t re-listen to the album and I won’t talk about it again, but I have four extra .JPG files on my computer.

The possibilities are endless.

#7: Drake – Scorpion
(Young Money)
Pop Rap, Contemporary R&B, Trap Rap

Truthfully, I don’t like complaining about Drake. The problem is that I don’t like Drake either and too much so to want to stop complaining about Drake when the time is right for me to complain about Drake, so now it’s time for me to complain about Drake.

I don’t think everything on Scorpion is bad, in fact, I’d like to think there are at least four impressive songs on here. However, if I said this about an album with ten songs, I probably wouldn’t have bothered here. The thing is that Scorpion is an album with twenty-five. Twenty five songs from an artist who already has enough trouble trying to make ten of them worth another listen. If we have two sleepy discs; one full of dreary rambling and the other packed with mediocre pop, I may as well have spent the 90 minutes listening to Backgammon tutorials and Tory Lanez.

It’s got to be unfortunate for Drake in a post-Story of Adidion planet Earth, I mean, at the end of the day he’s still the best-selling artist in the United States, but playing these diss track games had his rocky relationship with his son and said son’s mother thrust into the eye of public scrutiny like some kind of a tabloid-ready cumshot, which probably threw the man off in the midst of making this album, as he spends half of it trying to clear up what was going on, not realising that explaining something as hefty as this probably goes a bit beyond writing verses about Bella Hadid and his hissy fit at having to pay child support, on an album where the most memorable result from it was the soundtrack for a viral challenge about krumping next to a moving vehicle.

#6: Fall Out Boy – M A N I A
(Island)
Electropop, Pop Rock

I don’t like the new Fall Out Boy album, isn’t that a hot take?

I could continue this segment of the video whipping out snarky quips like “Fall Out Boy? More like Fall Off Boy!” and then go celebrate my rapier wit by raising a toast with a jug of my own spunk.

Instead, I’ll actually re-iterate what makes M A N I A a bit woeful. It starts out alright, maybe a bit glossy but nonetheless standard fare for Fall Out Boy’s forays into what we might expect from a pop band. The further you go, however, the more that you realise that their efforts are soaked in overblown post-production and embody attempts to embrace musical pop styles that are far so outside of their zone of strengths it cuts off any potential for them to re-consider their direction and progression before you’re hearing reggae fusion followed by the Jon Bellion equivalent of a dubstep drop.

What baffles me is that the aftermath of many delays still ended up being 35 minutes long and sounding rushedly slopped together like Mark Corrigan’s morrocan pasta bake in the final season of Peep Show.



#5: Lil Xan – Total Xanarchy
(Columbia)
Trap Rap

Truthfully, it would’ve been funny for me to like this album – Lil Xan is usually one of the go-tos when it comes to generalising hip-hop as a fallen art with no meaning and for me to rise above that and say “you know what? this album is actually pretty good” would’ve felt hella sick.

This becomes very difficult to do when the music itself is actually not very good at all, mostly warranting a lot of the criticism its had flung at it like mushy tomatoes from the oldhead’s compost bin. So I’ll give you that one, guys.

Total Xanarchy is completely lacking in character, charisma and even the kind of energy it needs to stay awake. Usually a debut album is meant to showcase the talent of the artist, and I dread the forthcoming material if this is to be any kind of a manifesto on what to expect. The best songs on this album are a Diplo instrumental and a remix of “Betrayed” with two extra verses from Yo Gotti and Rich the Kid of all possibles, so you can really get a neat scope of how inessential Mr. Xan’s contributions are to his own music.

#4: Tom Morello – The Atlas Underground
(Mom + Pop)
Electro-House, Rap Rock, Trap [EDM], Brostep

Tom Morello gets around a lot; and no, that’s not the name of an expensive ice-cream brand; he’s the guitarist for Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave, which I’m sure you may recognise as bands that primarily specialise in the realms of rock and metal.

However, his latest album here isn’t a rock record. I mean, it has guitars and a lot of those hefty riffs chugging around, but if you see Knife Party, Steve Aoki and Pretty Lights on the billing you might begin to think there’s something else going on. But then you look around and see – hold on – is that Tim McIlrath from Rise Against? Leikeli47 and Vic Mensa? Big Boi and Killer Mike? GZA and RZA? Portugal the Man? Marcus from Mumford and Sons?

The Atlas Underground is a DJ Khaled album sculpted from the grounds of a Bonnaroo lineup.

It’s the crossing paths between EDM, rock and hip-hop, and it stumbles often while trying to be anthemic and stirring. It’s confident, I’ll give it that, but you can be confident about anything, really. I suppose the upside is that the message it’s handing out there isn’t a harmful one, it is just that the delivery is maddeningly ham-fisted, furthermore taking the ham and shaking in your face chanting “we’ve got the ham, yes we do, yes we do”.

#3: Carnage – Battered, Bloody & Bruised
(Heavyweight)
Trap Rap, Alternative R&B, Hardcore [EDM]

This must be the most tragic thing that DJ Carnage’s ghost-producers have made yet. How does this still sound phoned-in? It has to be the most baffling set of EDM and hip-hop crossovers that I’ve heard yet. Aside from one excellent single featuring MadeInTYO and Mac Miller, plus a raving banger that plays off the obnoxiousness of both Carnage and Lil Pump, Battered, Bloody & Bruised doesn’t redeem itself much elsewhere, which is ridiculous considering the billing of featured artists. Is it a compensation for how little of a distinctive production style Carnage has this many years into his career? There’s more personality in royalty free vlogging music, or Vance Joy as I like to call it.

#2: At Wendys – We Beefin?
(Six Course)
Trap Rap, Novelty, Comedy Rap

Perhaps the most tiring trend on social media to have seen in the past few years aside from Everwing and Big Fish requests on Facebook was fast food chains starting to sass up their twitter profiles, firing out quirky and sardonic punchlines in an attempt to look extremely cool.

Hypocrisy?

Ah. My bad.

As companies channel their entire marketing team behind this one account and your fantasies of flirting with the Wendy's girl is turning out to be probably the world’s most ambitious catfish case, I suppose I see the fun in having loose yarns with the same fast food mascots that serve your cousin the same crusty sludge that they call chicken nuggets... though perhaps I wouldn’t have as much of a problem with it if half of the attempts weren’t so remarkably lame.

On second thought, I probably would, anyways.

Wendy's is the sassiest case of caustic social media personalities trying to pander towards anything that’ll get people talking about them, which is why the idea of a Wendy's hip-hop mixtape called We Beefin makes me want to pop a manu into a deep fat fryer.

In all fairness, whoever’s at the mic is a competent rapper and the album is produced to an okay standard. Also, this mixtape is really, really funny. Like there’s food puns, which are really, really funny. There are disses towards other fast food chains, which is really, really funny.

You’d bet they could make more burgers from all the dead horses that they’re beating.

“But Ricky, is this really worse than Thirty Seconds to Mars and Fall Out Boy?”
Perhaps not technically, but it’s irritated me enough to seem like it, so I’m going to be a grumpy bitch anyways. By the way, Wendy's, I hope you've sorted out those tomatoes.

#1: Yungblud – 21st Century Liability
(Geffen)
Rap Rock, Electropop, Emo-Rap

Tasteless aesthetic works not when you're actively trying to be educative about what you are speaking on.

A big part of me wants to assume that Yungblud means well, because he probably does, but that doesn't take away from how tone-deaf 21st Century Liability is, both in its aesthetic as a pop album and the general image of this new-and-coming artist. I'd like to think improvements and amends can be made with future development. I don't even doubt that there are genuine personal drives behind the writing on this album, and the idea of being open in your art is, of course, to be appreciated. This is me being optimistic.

As it stands, however, Yungblud pretends to grasp an understanding of societal issues, in particular, those surrounding mental health disorders. He then, somehow, manages to make a complete airheaded spectacle of it, by pretending that these things are very entertaining notions worth using as personality quirks. His music videos feature the sensationalism of mental hospital equipment and very damaging psychological disorders just to seem eccentric and zany, seeming completely unaware of their history, especially in the case of tools of oppression against neuro-divergent individuals. This could sound totally petty on my behalf; dissecting raving pop songs from a singer-songwriter who might just mean well in his writing.

Until you actually hear the songs themselves.

Lyrics are sung, such as "I don't wanna take my, I don't wanna take my... medication!" to the tune of a mocking schoolyard melody while dangerously generalising medicine for those with diagnosed disorders as something to avoid. It is obviously far more nuanced than this, and any means of tackling this subject matter is not the novel, overblown, careless manner in which it is done on 21st Century Liability. On "Psychotic Kids" he revels in the idea that younger generations are seen as 'psychotic' in the eyes of their misunderstanding elders while tastelessly bringing notions of drug use and parental neglect during the bridge, seemingly for no other reason than to shock and seem 'cooooool' and 'quuuiiiirky!', which is perhaps the biggest offender here.

Yungblud's ideas seem close to making a coherent statement but he is distracted always by the urge to be shocking and disturbing and 'quirky' about it, not realising that the basis of his entire aesthetic as an artist, which bleeds into his writing about the subject matter, is going to polarise a large amount of his audience (young, impressionable teenagers who themselves are likely to be reckoning with these issues themselves) with his language and delivery. Songs like "Psychotic Kids" reduce the concept of psychological disorder to a mere novelty. Others, like "California" and "Kill Somebody" which sensationalise suicide, using its premise in the modern day dangerously, as a tool of spectacle and theatrics, are utterly beyond words.

Other songs, such as "Machine Gun (F**k the NRA)" and "Polygraph Eyes" are written to cover entirely different subject matter (gun violence in the United States and date rape, respectively) with the same headiness. The intentions of these songs are clear, perhaps not as careless as the aforementioned. They do, however, falter in complete obnoxiousness both in their 'saviour of wokeness' tone and the continued use of shock imagery merely for the sake of shock, as opposed to letting it guide the message.

Tasteless aesthetic works not when you're actively trying to be educative about what you are speaking on.

I am not bothered by the opinions of Yungblud. I am extremely bothered by how he delivers them. That includes being via the medium of loud and brash reggae-trap fusion instrumentals.

Yungblud seems totally convinced that he’s some kind of a messenger of important values but it gradually begins to feel less like he’s laughing through the pain and more as if he’s laughing at it. Perhaps I should’ve looked at this with a more charitable lens but no clue if he deserves that with a delivery this clumsy with an accompanying team that probably saw no fault in it. It is genuinely the worst thing I bothered to listen to this year.