Terrible Albums That Have Only One Great Song

Released in 2003, Metallica's St. Anger had become known as the record that nearly broke up the most popular metal band in the world and, after listening to the album, many wished it had succeeded. A post-rehab James Hetfield sounded strained and off-key in many places, and there were no — count 'em, zero — Kirk Hammett solos on the record. The production was muddy — particularly the drum sound (Lars Ulrich, according to Pitchfork, "had taken the return to 'real Metal' quite literally, playing a drum set consisting of steel drums, aluminum toms, programmed double kicks, and a broken church bell"). PopMatters accused producer Bob Rock of "designing the album to sound like five-year-olds just learning to play on coffee cans and Fisher-Price musical equipment." The AV Club summed up St. Anger a little more succinctly (not to mention more politely): "a messy, unsatisfying misfire."

There's an exception, and it's called "Some Kind of Monster." It's got a heavier-than-heavy riff, and it's murky, but then again, so was Black Sabbath. In fact, until Hetfield steps up to the mic, you might think you're hearing an outtake from Paranoid or Master of Reality — it's so dark, it's a little scary. Hetfield recites a litany of body parts that are either turning on themselves or an aggressor, with power and rage. And yes, the drums are a problem. They're less a timekeeping mechanism than a disparate set of rhythms, but the power of the riff and the voice overcomes the weak foundation.

Liz Phair's 1993 album Exile in Guyville received the kind of critical praise reserved for Beatles records or Velvet Underground re-issues (or, in Rolling Stone, anything Mick Jagger touches). It wasn't viewed as simply an album full of rock 'n' roll songs; it was a feminist treatise, not to mention a thumb in the eye of male hegemony in popular culture. Or something like that. Phair spent the next decade routinely disappointing those critics with indie records that never quite matched the import of Exile. Then, in 2003, she went full-on sellout, working with hit producers and outside songwriters in an attempt to blast into the mainstream with her self-titled fourth record, which Pitchfork, in a rare zero-rating review, called "an album that could have just as easily been made by anybody else" and "hyper-commercialized teen-pop," and of which AllMusic's Stephen Thomas Erlewine wrote,"the clothing and trappings of mainstream pop don't fit her well."

They did fit her on one track — the album-opening "Extraordinary," which careens out of the gate with power (in the magnificent chorus) and finesse (in the carefully crafted verses) in equal parts. Could Avril Lavigne have sung this song and had a hit? Sure, but Ms. Lavigne could not have made the line "I'm just your ordinary, average, everyday, sane psycho supergoddess" work properly. For that, we needed a Guyville exile. We needed Liz Phair.

Guns N' Roses' Use Your Illusion Tour ended in 1993, after two and a half years and almost 200 shows. You might figure the band would have taken a few months off, maybe scattered to different spots in the Caribbean, before reconvening to spend a year or so crafting a new album, then starting up the touring machine again. No such luck. Fifteen years later, the band (now down to Axl Rose and a smattering of merry henchmen) stopped tinkering and finally released Chinese Democracy, a record Paste called "a bottomless pit dug by disposable income, a persecution complex, and egomania." Uncut sighed, "Rose's experimental hankerings generally give out after about 10 seconds. Oh Slash, where art thou?"

The top-hatted guitarist might have dug "Better," the mid-tempo head-nodder that combines Rose's interests in studio tweaking, guitar rock, and my-woman-done-me-wrong lyrics. The heavily filtered opening yields to the unfiltered power chording that drives the song, and it's the perfect transition. There's a little bit of thrash-y tantrum in the chorus, but otherwise, Rose and Co. ride that guitar groove for the song's entirety, and it works, so much better than the rest of the record.

Drummer Bill Berry left R.E.M. in 1997, and though the remaining members carried on as a trio, one could immediately notice a missing, difficult-to-pinpoint element in the band's music. The electronic blips on 1998's Up and overarching sadness of 2004's Around the Sun could not cover it, nor could the drab, monochromatic lull of 2001's Reveal. "Reveal is a drowsy album about daydreams," declared the Village Voice, "a sleeping pill for the unconscious. It makes you wonder if R.E.M. have finally decided to live up to their name." Critic Robert Christgau, also writing in the Voice, described the record as "not as bad as it first sounds, but also not as good as they thought when they released it, or they wouldn't have, I hope."

The standout track on the album is "Imitation of Life," in which a small army of acoustic guitars and a squirrelly synthesizer amplify Michael Stipe's abstract lyrics about sugar cane, lemonade, freezing rain, and other seemingly random things. Longtime R.E.M. fans are used to such abstractions, and the instrumentation on the track gives it a dense yet summery feel, something the rest of Reveal is missing and desperately needs.

David Bowie's short-lived band project Tin Machine was short-lived for a reason — Bowie's fans did not accept their hero fronting a noise rock quartet that didn't play David Bowie songs and which seemed intent on blasting apart the legacy they held so dear. While the band's first album in 1988 gained a modicum of renown (and even some airplay on college radio), 1991's Tin Machine II landed with a thud — and it wasn't just drummer Hunt Sales' heavy kick drum. "Everything on Tin Machine II ... sounds like typically mediocre late-period David Bowie," Entertainment Weekly noted. "Every track builds to a flat anti-climax," said the third edition of the Rolling Stone Record Guide, which called the record "gentlemanly avant-garde competence" — certainly not what Bowie was going for.

The exception is "One Shot," which, in spite of some sketchy lyrics ("One day nothing meant nothing / Ten dollars tore us apart"), is a piece of speaker-cone-shredding goodness. Credit must go to the aforementioned Sales, who lets out his inner John Bonham (particularly on the post-guitar-solo breakdown) and guitarist Reeves Gabrels — all five of him on this track — for his riffage, his tonal colors, and his extra-thick slab of a solo. "One Shot" may be Bowie's best moment of the '90s, the one moment Tin Machine sounded like they could take on the world and win.

With Introducing the Hardline According to Terence Trent D'Arby, his 1987 debut record, Terence Trent D'Arby announced himself as one of the great new voices in pop and R&B. By claiming the record was better than the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, he also proved he had one of the great bloated egos in pop and R&B. By following up a stone-cold classic with a ponderous, impenetrable sophomore effort, Neither Fish nor Flesh, D'Arby proved himself to be one of the greatest momentum killers in pop or R&B. The Rolling Stone Album Guide 's fourth edition calls it an "overtly experimental, cranky mishmash that makes the Beatles' White Album look precision-tooled."

There is one focused, hip-swaying, gotta-get-on-the-dance-floor moment in all this. "Attracted to You" bumps with a Stax/Volt groove, slinky rhythm guitar, and a bass line that is so in the pocket that it practically sewed the pocket up around itself. D'Arby reclaims his crown as Soul Cousin Number One for four minutes, and in those four minutes one can forget the "mishmash" and just get down.

In the '90s, Smashing Pumpkins turned out one snarling, era-defining dark grunge jam after another, such as "Today," "Cherub Rock," and "Bullet With Butterfly Wings." Sure, they were a little pretentious, never more so than when they saddled an album with the title MACHINA / The Machines of God.

Hitting millions of Discmen and Napster windows in 2000, the Pumpkins told the world the '90s really were over, because they'd lost their magic, but not their self-righteousness. "Everything about MACHINA is capital-I important, with virtually ever element delivered in gaudy excess," wrote AV Club's Stephen Thompson. "Gelatinous bass issues form the crust like pus," wrote Brent DiCrescenzo for Pitchfork. "The psoriatic sound comes off like infected yellow scabs growing on fragile frosted glass."

Sure, but there are a couple of decent tracks on MACHINA: the propulsive lead single "The Everlasting Gaze," and "Stand Inside Your Love." It somehow synthesizes the band's dueling songcraft concepts, taking the haunting vulnerability of "Disarm" or "Thirty-Three," but then building to the arena rock riffs and blistering drums found on stuff like "Today." (Plus it's laced with those pop and goth flourishes the Pumpkins used on its previous album, Adore.) Even critics not thrilled by the rest of MACHINA think "Stand Inside Your Love" is a high point for the band. Christopher John Farley of Time called the song "thunderously tuneful," while Jason Ferguson of MTV said the song possessed a "'Cherub Rock' bombast."