The 10 Worst Metal Albums of 2018

The 10 Worst Metal Albums of 2018

Oh yeah, end-of-year lists. I enjoyed this last year because it was such a nice chance to go over so much of my favorite music and slather it with more praise, but of course, I’m staring this with the worst albums. Why? Why shed extra light on the things I like the least? Well as with any critique, which is what I’m trying to bring to the table here and not just shit-talking, it’s supposed to be constructive, and these are the albums I found to be most in need of that kind of constructive criticism. These are the students who need to stay after class and have a parent-teacher conference, maybe because what they’re trying isn’t working, maybe because they’re fucking up and it’s time to stop. Either way...

Just the obvious disclaimer here: I didn’t go out searching for terrible shit. I found some inadvertently, or at least through a curious peek into something I had only minimal hopes for. But I didn’t dig through Bandcamp to find high school Slayer wannabes, and I even passed up a few albums I had seriously bad premonitions of. Tom Morello put out some solo shit that I just had no will for after Prophets of Rage last year, and I saw some shit about a Hollywood Undead EP earlier this year, which I also just did not have the time or stomach for. That being said, all these albums here are ones I not only got the chance to hear, but I also wrote about them.

So, from bad to worse, here are the ten worst albums I wrote about this year.

10. Tenacious D – Post-Apocalypto

This list starts off with an asterisked one because Tenacious D’s fourth album is only metallic for like a little over a minute. I love Tenacious D, Jack Black, and Kyle Gass, so it is with great sadness that I place them here. Post-Apocalypto is just such an amateurish mess of nonsensical humor that must have been really fun for JB and KG to draw up, but it does not connect on record. Given that it’s been released in conjunction with their animated series, it makes sense that it ended up being not quite like Tenacious D’s previous full-lengths. It’s only under half an hour, but it’s so starved of all the things that have made Tenacious D appealing, and instead comes across as a condensed goof-off session that I guess you just had to be there for. I don’t know if the band are considering this a bonafide studio album; I doubt it, but I hope that the D focus on the clever, well-crafted song-writing that has been their strength for most of their career, rather than this kind of half-hearted overly ridiculous kind of stuff.

9. Five Finger Death Punch – And Justice for None

I am actually amazed that I found eight other metal albums worse than this one, because my god this one is atrocious. Granted I listened to a lot of music this year, and with that heavy listening came a lot of risks, which is what every new Five Finger Death Punch album has become as my hopes for hearing them snap out of their bro metal and radio rock haze has dwindled away with each successive release since American Capitalist. Listening to their new albums is no longer a hope to hear them at their full potential and has become a dreaded biannual event in which they somehow slide deeper and deeper into inexcusable, lazy retreading of the same tired formulas and childishly approached topics, and this album is the worst they’ve ever sounded, by far. The horrible alternation of overcompensating energy drink metal and softy ballads is impossible to comprehend on here, and every rehash on here reeks to high heaven of creative bankruptcy and corporate puppeteering. There really isn’t any advice I could give the band that disappointed fans and critics haven’t given them. The stranglehold their success has placed on them has directed them in the worst direction possible, and they are being milked dry for cash rather than supported to make genuine art.

8. Anvil – Pounding the Pavement

This one was at least so bad in a way that it was a little funny, but funny kind of in the same way Michael Scott is funny, funny in the way your old high school fan fiction that you were so serious about and invested is funny to look back on because you’re amazed you were so convinced that this absolute bullshit you wrote was fuckin’ amazing. Yeah, that’s kind of what Anvil is like, and it’s tough to describe Anvil’s career in such a manner, but with one amateurish album after the next for half a century, it’s hard to think of something more accurate. And Pounding the Pavement is yet another addition to their obsolete and poorly executed sound. I have no problem with bands keeping older styles alive, but if bands like Havok, Power Trip, and (to an extent) Ghost take me on a sweet nostalgia trip to metal’s earlier days, Anvil is a reminder of why we’ve moved on. I don’t like writing so harshly, and I can’t help but respect Anvil’s dedication to the genre, but part of that respect is being honest about what isn’t working for them. I would love to see them come through with a nice vintage heavy metal record that challenges the notions of moving to more extremes; I would love to hear a set of nothing but classic hard-rocking tunes that do indeed show what made metal so great even in its youngest years. But this isn’t it, and I think it would take something monumental to shake Anvil out of their ways, or at least their process that just keeps churning out mediocrity. My hope: they really buckle down, but not just to “rock harder” or intensify their energy on something that’s not working. My hope is that they take an honest look at what needs to change, let go of whatever stubbornnesses might be holding them back creatively, and really nurture their work. Otherwise it’s going to be serviceable, but grimace-y, hard rocking metal until Anvil’s end.

7. Otep – KULT 45

Out of the ten albums here, I think this one has the longest write-up associated with it, and it makes me think I might end up talking about KULT 45 at length again, which I’m going to try not to do here. The disaster this album became was something probably anyone could see coming from a mile away, but it also ended up bringing so much more with it that made it so much more colossal. Much of my writing on the album was dedicated to clarifying my respect for, but also my criticisms for the actions of, the band’s leader, Otep Shamaya, that have poisoned the perceptions of so many. I like her music; when she’s on it, she’s on it. But so much of what makes her a difficult person for so many to reconcile with outside her music has seeped into this album. And it’s not being anti-Trump or a “feminazi” that has made this such a displeasing album. In fact, so much of what is so annoying about so much of the other anti-Trump music that’s been coming out over the past two to three years is what makes this album annoying as well. Shamaya says a lot, but a whole lot of nothing, and nothing that hasn’t been said before better by other people. In fact, this album strikes me as the kind that would just make a Trump supporter even more firm in their position, and that is, I think, the big, core problem with this album and the mindset behind it. Rather than rallying feuding people behind their similarities to face the root cause of their problems in unison, Shamaya only stokes the fires out of a fetishization for protest and revolution, which I cannot respect. Also the rapping on this album was very bad, not something Shamaya does well with as an amateur. I imagine this album will be a low point Otep, hopefully, never stoops to again, but I do worry this perhaps sends her down a horrible path of adding music to enraged Twitter hot takes.

6. Shinedown – ATTENTION ATTENTION

Right about here is where this list kind of develops its theme, I suppose. The Five Finger Death Punch album started it, but Shinedown and the folks below them on here are making it worse. That theme is shitty radio drivel with such an obvious, transparent motive in mind ($$$). In a way I feel bad for these artists who probably struggle out on the road to make it; in these trying times for musicians, I can see how the lure of radio-rock revenue could reel in the desperate and the starving. But that doesn’t mean I have to like the music, and being that they did a coheadline tour with Five Finger Death Punch this year, I think their wallets are probably doing alright. I thought it couldn’t get worse than Threat to Survival, but oh my god did it get worse. This album is bloody awful. This is the most plastic-y and processed Shinedown have ever sounded, and I have such a hard time imagining who this could be for, more so how a band that made Us and Them and Leave a Whisper could make something so utterly soulless. But this isn’t the kind of apathetic drivel that comes from a band not trying and just running on autopilot. Oh no, they were clearly trying, trying for a sound that mainstream radio would gobble up, and the clear motive with which they approached this record shines through. It does not go down easily, and it leaves a terrible aftertaste. All I can say to Shinedown, if I had the chance to, would be to stop, turn around, and focus on putting some passion into the music again, not worrying about how it will sell.

5. Three Days Grace – Outsider

Well the years start comin’ and they don’t stop comin’ and they don’t stop comin’ and they don’t stop comin’ and they don’t stop comin’. This album has nothing to do with Smashmouth, but that lyric was the first thing that came to mind when I got to this one because the thing about this list is that it just gets harder and harder to muster the further I get, and this piece of Three Days Grace’s floundering second act is an exceptionally hard one to stomach. Three Days Grace have not been the same since Adam Gontier’s departure, and it has not been easy to watch them struggle to find their footing without his voice and creative input. They certainly weren’t ever perfect, but they had some genuine highlights throughout their career, and they were certainly never this terrible. From the several-times recycled song ideas to Matt Walst’s bad Chester Bennington impersonation, Three Days Grace sound lost in the desert just as much as they did on Human. What should have been a more decisive, forward-thinking project to get their career back on track to a healthy second act is instead stuck wallowing in the past like a former high school varsity footballer player talking about his homecoming touchdown catch when he’s 30. It’s hard to say what they should be doing without Gontier at the front anymore, but it’s definitely not this. It’s definitely not trying to fabricate his presence and direction while simultaneously trying to keep up with the latest radio rock trends. I honestly don’t know if Three Days Grace can ever recover their past form; it’s hard to tell if the current band members have the capacity to do so, and it seems their trying to evolve but replicate their appeal with Gontier is a futile effort, which is a struggle I can only empathize with and hope they can find a way out of.

4. Therion – Beloved Antichrist

The symphonic metal powerhouse put out possible the longest slog of boring, partially thought out material that was just so impossibly hard to sit through, not for its length, but rather its sheer boredom. I was actually just listening to (and enjoying) Prurient’s album from last year (which was even longer), and it confirmed to me that it had nothing to do with my patience or musical stamina; Therion just put out three hours of half-baked, ungroomed trash. I had no desire to listen to this whole thing again just to confirm its place here, and I didn’t have to, the segments of the 46 songs I chose reminded me just fine enough of why I never came back to it throughout the year. At its best, symphonic metal can be some of the most grandiose and enrapturing music you’ll ever find. On the good side of the coin is the Septicflesh album from last year that I have not been able to stop spinning (“Portrait of a Faceless Man” is a certified banger for the ages). On the opposite side is Beloved Antichrist, an album so consumed in its own narrative it forgets to make the music enjoyable. Drowned in the most monotonous operatic symphonic typicality, it’s the type of symphonic music reminiscent of being trapped in a really boring series of violin and piano recitals as a kid, so poorly performed it’s obvious the only people that give a shit at any given moment are the parents of whatever kid is up to do their rendition of Bach’s Minuet in G#. The band clearly had this magnificent concept in mind, but didn’t invest enough into it musically to keep it going at an acceptable standard for three fucking hours. And look I get it, I understand getting caught up in the catharsis of creating something you think is going to be really epic, but you have to be able to pull your head out of your own ass and look at it from the perspective of those who weren’t in your head with you during the creative process and make sure the grandeur they themselves imagined is actually perceivable from the outside. I get the sense that Therion wrote a concept prose piece and them just haphazardly coated it in stale music as an afterthought. Needless to say, I would suggest them not doing that again.

3. Ministry - AmeriKKKant

Oh man, the further down this list I get, the harder it becomes to find something constructive to say beyond, “just put in more effort next time”, or “well, don’t do that again”, because the lowest albums on here sound overwhelmingly like the artists didn’t even fucking try. And that is the especially baffling case for Ministry’s new album this year, AmeriKKKant. You would think that under the Trump administration, Al Jourgensen would manage to at least conjure up some pretty potent political rage, but AmeriKKKant finds him sounding more creatively and performatively asleep than I have ever heard Ministry sound before. And with horrendously half-assed lyrical voids like “Antifa”, Al shows himself to be an opportunistic charlatan lazily cashing in on his notoriety and the widespread political dissatisfaction this album milks so poorly. Musically and lyrically it’s so insanely diluted and recycled, from the gutless, droning industrial grooves to Al’s lazy repetition of whatever anti-Trump catchphrases he’s heard over the past two years. I really am at a loss for words with this one, and it’s at this point on the list where if I could give my advice to Ministry, it would be to just stop.

2. Bullet for My Valentine – Gravity

This one hurts the most because Bullet for My Valentine were such a huge part of my immersion into heavy metal in my adolescence. The Poison was (and still is) a killer metalcore album, and Scream Aim Fire had much of the same fire, but the band really seemed to be confused in what direction they wanted to take on the subsequent Fever, and especially Temper Temper. I was really relived that they were getting back to doing what they had done well on Venom in 2015, but apparently not enough of their fans were waiting around for their return to form because the only reason I can imagine them going from Temper Temper to Venom to this, is to salvage their dwindling career by trying to tap a new sales market. Gravity is Bullet for My Valentine’s transparent pitch to the powers that be of radio rock and Spotify rock playlists, and from what I can tell, I’m not the only one seeing through this desperate attempt by the band to transform into some Imagine Dragons look-alike for the sake of a little bit of renewed relevance. Coupled with Matt Tuck’s recent asinine “rock is dead” statements for publicity’s sake, this album and everything around it just stunk to high heaven of selling out, and if Matt thought it was tough to get old fans back after Temper Temper, he’s going to have an incredibly hard time getting them to support the band’s inevitable return-to-our-roots album after this shit. At this point, I have a hard time putting hope in a return of classic Bullet myself even if Matt Tuck swears he’s back in it for the music, because after the panning this album is getting across the board, another 180° would smell of career damage control just as much as this album did. Even so, I’d take the band at least returning to something they’ve shown at least a proficiency in over a continuation of this.

1. Black Veil Brides – Vale

Here it is, I had predicted this being the worst album of 2018 when I wrote about it earlier this year, and thank God nothing topped this one, because holy shit this is an atrocity. Going into this album, I had nothing against Black Veil Brides unlike how so much of the metal world seemed to, but this album showed me the light. I really can’t speak to what kind of people the band members are like on a personal level, but I sure know how I feel about them now on an artistic level. I had been easily avoiding them for the previous entirety of their career, and this sour cursory listen has only confirmed that that is what I should have done and will do going forward. This is the most nauseatingly stale, recycled, passionless album I have ever made myself sit through, and I cannot for the life of me understand what anyone else sees in this goddamn thing. The lazy songwriting and lyricism is one thing, but the sheer lack of passion in Andy Biersack’s Kroeger-esque vocal performances is probably the most insufferable aspect of this album as a whole, never mind the three-minutes-at-best worth of material stretched out to eight minutes on “Dead Man Walking (Overture II)” just for the sake of having an “epic” on the album (which it certainly wasn’t), or the cheesy arena rock “whoa-whoas” littered all throughout. No, fuck this blatantly pandering pile of shit and the artistic laziness that birthed it. I can seriously give no more of my life to this ass-load of an album, this is the last of my life I am ever dedicating to focusing on this album, so goodbye and good riddance, Vale. And Black Veil Brides, I don’t think I’ll ever be coming back.