What Are the Most Disappointing Albums? | Hacker News Reader

What Are the Most Disappointing Albums?

priceonomics.com

I would prefer charts based solely on album sales, metascore while interesting is full of bias. There are some artists who cannot be scored below certain thresholds either because of likability or political correctness. However total sales is usually a better indicator and longevity of sales, as in how long after initial debut did sales stay good.

But what if there are people who buy the album, only to find out later that it was disappointing? Or fans, who buy the album regardless of quality.

Sales numbers are not that exciting when some people can look at actual streaming statistics. Something like http://poly-graph.co/timeless/ with album sales vs median track streaming count would be interesting. (median, because albums are not about hit songs)

In addition to the biases, there is another flaw in this analysis- they assume that quality is a linear function of critic scores. So, jumping from 30 metacritic score to 50 metacritic score is considered the same as jumping from 60 to 80. This is quite unlikely to be the case. Thus, they should at least also incorporate absolute Metacritic score into the 'disappointment metric'. As an example, Kanye's MBDTF is great, but his two albums prior to it were 'very good', with an average of 77. While, Lenny Kravitz went from 58 to 70, i.e. 'ok' to 'pretty good'.

You should penalize higher absolute scores on previous albums for 'surprisingly successful'. Likewise, higher absolute scores on current albums must be penalized in the criterion for 'most disappointing'.

One certain way of addressing these biases and the linearity assumption is by plotting the distribution of metascores, and using that as a prior to improve fairness.

Album sales do nothing (or rather, little) to chart how disappointing an album is.

An album can be disappointing or exciting. A sale is a sale, and says nothing of that.

Idlewild scores 72 which is pretty solid but makes the 'top 20 disappointing' because the previous two Outkast albums averaged 90+ and a straight arithmetic difference is used (with percentage of previous two it would rank somewhat lower).

A bit of New York Yankees or Jimmie Johnson (NASCAR) syndrome. If you don't win the championship then it is a disappointment.

You get 24 years to make your first album, and 24 months to make your second.

Sadly no, you get 18 months to make what your label wants your first album to be, then if you're lucky you get 35 years to make what you wanted your first album to be. This was starting to change, but the gaming is starting a new.

For a band member or solo performer, it must be grim to sit contemplating an album which you yourself know is no good, and is likely to be career-wounding, but which you'll more or less have to release anyway for contractual reasons or for the money.

I suppose the thing to ensure is that you don't get into a contract where you have to do that. If you are releasing bottom-of-the-barrel tat for money just to be popular and sell albums, does that mean that the first release you put out was drivel just to be popular? Thought-provoking eh?

They could just put out an album that's completely different, like Tom Jones did when he didn't want to release another Sex Bomb...

Metallica should be an honorary member in any such grouping.

In the inconsistent group for sure

I'd say they've been consistently mediocre for the last while

They have the consistently great part up to (and possibly including) the black album. Then they start to fall into the disappointing category.

I'm still trying to figure out what happened to them. I guess a multitude of bad things happening all the same time?

After Jason left, and St. Anger came out, I just checked out. At the time there were so many other great metal bands to see and hear which completely eclipsed them.

Death Magnetic isn't too bad. Not Puppets good. But I listen to it every once in a while, where St. Anger was the most disappointing thing I ever experienced musically.

You have to remember St. Anger was a full 6 years after they put out anything original. They were trying to rekindle the old stuff, but it's hard to remember how it was to be hungry after being on top for so long.

If you ever saw the making of St. Anger documentary, you knew there was no way it was going to be good. James went into rehab 1/2 way through production out of nowhere. Everyone was angry with each other. Krik just wanted to play and then hang out with his horses on his ranch. Lars forgot how to drum. It was really bad.

Then all of a sudden they finally adjusted to being sober and hey, look at that. Something pretty good.

I saw the documentary and it was pretty eye opening. It was a complete train wreck, and Bob Rock and everybody else around them telling them St. Anger was going to be as good as the black album was pretty cringe inducing. The Crazy Cabby scene I thought to myself, "Jesus man, just tell them it sucks, just be honest. Someone has to have the balls to tell them this is horrible."

My favorite part of the documentary was when Jason quit and was playing with Echobrain and James and Lars went to go see him. He totally fled the scene and wouldn't talk to them. Even years later, he's still bitter about what James did:

http://loudwire.com/jason-newsted-why-he-left-metallica/

Death Magnetic is pretty decent. After hearing interviews with James saying it was a return to the thrash metal of Master and Ride the Lightening saying they were going back to their roots, I was pretty disappointed.

I like their angry song about batteries....

I know I get that angry when my laptop is running out of charge, that's for sure!

Granted it's not all that new, but Calling All Stations by Genesis was probably the worst I've ever heard. It did so poorly it killed the tour and put the band into hiatus. Pretty impressive results for a band that had been on top for decades.

Yeah, they lost Phil Collins, but forgetting how to write music or lyrics was a real surprise. George Starostin's review nailed it...

I've never heard that album but looking it up, I never realised that Spock's Beard's drummer had a hand in it, and Ray Wilson. Wow, never knew that thanks!

I think I have a couple of Ray Wilson albums he brought out on the Inside Out label before it went bust in Germany - there was a rerecording of "Inside" on it but I can't remember any of the other songs because they start, introduce a verse and then end without any instrumental breaks, which I was hoping for...

Shouldn't they count the 4 albums with the largest variance in the average between the four albums?

> We determined the overall average score for all of these > artists and then looked at how much an individual artist’s > average album deviated from this score.

Wouldn't this make a consistently below average artist count as an inconsistent?

Took me a while to process the graph, since Random Access Memories was not where I expected it to be - based on my own experience, I expected it to be strongly disappointing.

> was not where I expected it to be - based on my own experience,

The disconnect happens because you're comparing your individual taste to a metascore -- an aggregation of other critics' reviews.

Everybody will dislike or be disappointed in something that the majority will like.

I find critic reviews to be of minimal value. My personal likes and dislikes are not correlated to critics ratings.

Music reviews can be very political or based on popularity of the artist(s). In gaming a very low score can almost always mean a very flawed game. In music a low score can just mean that artist didn't progress enough or wasn't what is in fashion right now.

It did win best album of the year at the Grammies, which is probably as strong an indicator that you can get that critics liked it.

I was surprised that their earlier albums weren't better received by critics though.

I know what you mean, but it does kind of make sense. Discovery is amazing, but I'd consider it pretty far outside the mainstream, not something that's going to get much radio play. The fact that no one in this thread is talking about Human After All tells you what you need to know about it. RAM brings in much more pop influence on top of being a stellar album, and is accordingly played much more often.

I love Human After All

I really didn't like it. It feels too much like an album intended for remixing; I don't think the songs stand up on their own. As a result, Alive 2007 turned out to be amazing, as they mix songs together and produce really good results.

Homework feels similar, I have a hard time just listening to the plain album. There's good stuff there, it's just too "raw". I don't have a good word.

Where have you heard RAM played out of curiosity?

One of the weakest aspects of the album in my opinion was the utter lack of relevant situations where the album could be played. You can't play any of the tracks at a club, party, or even just casually hanging out with friends. It's an introspective, needy album, unlike Homework and Discovery.

I haven't heard any RAM tracks played anywhere after the initial Get Lucky phase wore thin.

On the radio. Get Lucky and Lose Yourself got lots of play on my local independent radio station (The Current in St Paul, MN), and I still hear them fairly often. I also heard Get Lucky at a water park last summer, and I hear it in restaurants now and then. Just two songs from the album, but I think that's average.

Same for me! and I remember the critics weren't exactly good when it came out?

I heard that when their following live album came out (Alive 2007) people actually started appreciating the RAM album more. Could that be a factor?

RAM is their latest album. Alive came out before it.

Ooh yes my mistake. I had "Human After All" in mind.

Though I have a neutral opinion of RAM, the graph is tricky to be read, maybe because it's vertical and not horizontal

contour lines of performance difference are equal spaced diagonals. To properly convey this the chart should be rotated 45 cw and labeled with the axes, improvement over previous and average of previous.

Homework and Discovery were massive in the uk/Europe but maybe not America. When you add in some of the collaborations on that album I would always have expected it to be massive. Not sure what the American perspective is on this though?

It was perhaps disappointing to long time fans, but the general public liked it. And Human After All got pretty bad reviews, which brought the average down.

I think that long term, the influence of Random Access Memories will be in the reduction of the use of compression (aka the Loudness War). Daft Punk specifically told the engineer to not compress it as much, and people who bought the album were surprised at how listenable it was.

I really disliked Random Access Memories.

I have always thought Daft Punk was an acquired taste. RAM was very much a 70's disco throwback, which probably threw a lot of their EDM fans for a loop.

I agree though, overall the album was not that good. They were all over the map on this one.

That's such a weird case. IMO, the leap in rating is nothing more than critics finally catching up and understanding what they were doing. If the RAM master tapes got magically timetravelled back to 2006 they would have gotten the same middling ratings.

Conversely, I'd argue that the most disappointing album was also a product of critic quirks more than anything - they vastly overrated the mopey indie rock of The Antlers during the last years where that was fashionable.

One thing to keep in mind is that overall music critics were not all that good at being impartial critics until recently. There was a lot of taste making, some of it even profit driven, until blogging made them more honest.

Mos Def's (Yasiin Bey's) The Ecstatic is a classic, not surprised to see as an unexpected success.

Agreed great album. Not surprised to see Lupe's LASERS on most the disappointing list.

I wish The Ventures made the list somewhere, maybe in most consistent, but I would guess they do not have enough reviews to fit the criteria of the article.

http://www.markprindle.com/ventures.htm

I'm not sure what I'm supposed to take away from this article that I didn't know before reading it. I know that some albums are disappointing. That sometimes successful albums from an artist are followed by unsuccessful ones. This is a bit like saying that the sky is blue, water is wet... Unless of course I'm missing the point, which is entirely possible.

You missed the whole:

a) formalizing of the concept of dissapointing (the particular statistical method they used), and

b) the particular list of albums they gave, using said method

Both things you didn't knew beforehand (and even if you did most didn't).

There's a difference between the vague "yeah, some albums are subjectively disappointing" vs "these albums are disappointing for these objective criteria".

Yes, the sky is blue. What shade? what's the gradient? what factors affect it? what causes a staggeringly "sky blue" color as opposed to blue-tinted overcast? how does looking thru a projected shadow affect what's seen? I had an art teacher point out that the lesson on painting landscapes included explaining to kids that the sky comes all the way down to the horizon, something that startled most of them.

Yes, you know. How well?

> "these albums are disappointing for these objective criteria".

Except that the actual scores used to make this "objective" analysis are largely subjective.

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