Scott Weiland – The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year (2011) The result was an utter shambles that managed to be both turgid and lightweight. When going grunge on Slang didn’t work, and an attempt to recapture former glories with Euphoria failed, Leppard decided to kickstart a new millennium as the world’s oldest boy band, and made an album with people who wrote songs for Backstreet Boys, Britney and Westlife. The worst, Brandon, is a sappy orchestral ballad written and sung by Tommy Lee. The only decent song, Afraid, comes on like a post-grunge Cheap Trick. From the Marilyn Manson pastiche of Find Myself to the fake-punk title track, the Crüe sounded hopelessly out of touch. Instead, Generation Swine was a piss-poor alternative rock record that died on its arse. In fact it couldn’t have been further from that. During the making of it John Corabi was dumped and Vince Neil persuaded to rejoin the band, but was result the classic Crüe comeback fans hoped for? No it wasn’t. The Crüe’s last album of the 1990s was almost comically bad. If you like train wrecks, this is for you. It’s even worse when one considers how many truly brilliant live Dead albums there have been, as well as several excellent Dylan live ones. Indeed it’s saddening to think that these deadening versions of seven Dylan tunes (from 1965’s Queen Jane Approximately to 1979’s Slow Train) were apparently the choice selections from the dozens of hours of live tapes they compiled. In reality this mishmash of recordings from their joint tour together in 1987 pleased neither Dylan fans nor Dead fans. Please, Gene – never, ever make another solo album.īob Dylan & The Grateful Dead – Dylan And The Dead (1989) The way-too-knowingly titled Asshole was an aging rock star’s predictably doomed attempt to get down with The Kids which reached a nadir just two songs in, with a fist-gnawingly bad version of The Prodigy’s Firestarter. But no – 26 years after that debacle, Uncle Gene returned with a belated follow-up that made his original effort sound like a masterpiece. You’d have thought the God Of Thunder would have learned a lesson from the reaction to Kiss’ four-solo-albums-in-one-day stunt back in 1978. As co-producers, Malcolm and Angus Young somehow made AC/DC sound like a tribute act on a bad night, and as writers all they could muster was one half-decent song, Shake Your Foundations. But with Fly On The Wall they lost the plot. With its stripped-down, bone-dry sound and some meaty material, it’s their most underrated record. For 1983’s Flick Of The Switch, the band had taken the DIY route, and it worked. But just five years later, with Fly On The Wall, they got everything wrong – horribly so. Its blockbuster success helped pave the way for a whole new second wave of hair metal bands, while proving that the late-'80s musical climate could also be very friendly to veteran hard rock acts, a lead many would follow in the next few years.On Back In Black AC/DC got everything right. The strong pop hooks and "perfect"-sounding production of Hysteria may not appeal to die-hard heavy metal fans, but it isn't heavy metal - it's pop-metal, and arguably the best pop-metal ever recorded. Rex, particularly on the playfully silly anthem "Pour Some Sugar on Me," and the British glam rock tribute "Rocket," while power ballads like "Love Bites" and the title track lack the histrionics or gooey sentimentality of many similar offerings. Joe Elliott's lyrics owe an obvious debt to his obsession with T. But Def Leppard's music had always employed big, anthemic hooks, and few of the pop-metal bands who had hit the charts in the wake of Pyromania could compete with Leppard's sense of craft certainly none had the pop songwriting savvy to produce seven chart singles from the same album, as the stunningly consistent Hysteria did. Pyromania's slick, layered Mutt Lange production turned into a painstaking obsession with dense sonic detail on Hysteria, with the result that some critics dismissed the record as a stiff, mechanized pop sellout (perhaps due in part to Rick Allen's new, partially electronic drum kit). Where Pyromania had set the standard for polished, catchy pop-metal, Hysteria only upped the ante.
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