Did you ever just want one more awesome NIN song? Because lord knows Trent Reznor isn’t going to ever give you one… at least not until he maybe relapses and he may even be too far gone for that to even matter in making his music anymore. Thankfully Richard Patrick took it upon himself to do just that, give us that one last good NIN song. Besides fronting Filter Richard Patrick is best known for toiling under Trent Reznor’s thumb as NIN’s guitarist and being Robert Patrick’s brother… Who is Robert Patrick? The T-motherfucking-1000!!!!

I feel kind of conflicted putting Short Bus up here because truth be told it’s isn’t really that awesome of an album… it’s carried solely on the weight of Hey Man Nice Shot AKA the best NIN song they never wrote. The rest of the album sounds all the same, 90s aggro-industrial pretty hate machine rejects. But hey so many strive to sound like Pretty Hate Machine rejects and failed so as backhanded as it may sound it is an accomplishment of sorts. Dose is an OK track, but that’s still pushing it. You can sometimes find downloads of Short Bus where someone has thankfully included Filter’s only other really good track… a collaboartion with The Crystal Method, (Can’t You) Trip Like I Do from the Spawn Soundtrack.

But like I said Filter’s ode to Budd Dwyer and not Kurt Cobain (as was rumored when the song came out) Hey Man Nice Shot is that good (at least to me) to propel this bad boy to an awesomely awful album canon! It’s totally the best song ever written about putting a gun in your mouth and pulling the trigger… if that can even be considered an accomplishment!

On a side note. The Wiz (RIP) that used be across teh street from my house used to have Filter mislabeled as FITLER! Hahaha Fitler!

Although Marylin Manson would single handedly spearhead the Mall Goth revolution of the mid 90s… it was Type O Negative that laid that initial seed a year earlier with Bloody Kisses. After the collapse of Brooklyn thrashers Carnivore in the late 80sPete Steele took a major left turn and formed Type O Negative who in ’91 released a mess of an album called Slow, Deep & Hard. A poorly executed concept album about a failed relationship that kind of threw everything and the kitchen sink into itself stylistically. The songs were super long and It was parts metal, parts goth, parts punk & parts hardcore and I couldn’t tell if it or the lyrics were supposed to be taken seriously. The best way I could describe it is that Tool would would later on do exactly what this album tried to do but do it successfully.

2 years later came Bloody Kisses and while they still over indulged their own songs by 3-5 minutes this time they got it right and wrong in every way and voila! An Awesomely Awful Album was born! I was never certain if Pete Steele took himself or Type O seriously back then, but listening back to Black No. 1 now I can totally see that everything they did was tongue in cheek. Check out the lyrics to Black No. 1… they’re hilarious, at least to me!
“She’s got a date at midnight – with Nosferatu
oh baby, Lilly Munster – ain’t got nothing on you “
or
“Yeah you wanna go out ’cause it’s raining and blowing
you can’t go out ’cause your roots are showing
dye em black – dye em black “

Add Christian Women, a sludgy cover of Summer Breeze & of course We Hate Everyone and you have everything that was horrible, sad & forever sullied the notion of goth rock BUT was equally awesome and irresistible all at the same time.

Despite popular lore, I think Aerosmith was in fact the band who signed a deal with the Devil and not Led Zeppelin. There isn’t any other 70s hard rock relic that somehow manages to dupe most of the public into seeming relevant with each passing decade and every new album. Yet Tyler, Perry & Co. do each and every time, How!?? The Devil’s trickery I say! Get A Grip came out at that point in your life when you were just getting past Motley Crüe, G’nR, etc, etc and full on into Nirvana, Mudhoney & Soundgarden. It was beyond cheesy but that lingering hair metal in you couldn’t resist! And then of course there were the videos… Dude the videos! I think more than anything it was the videos and not the songs that made this such an awesomely awful nicely aged chunk of Gouda.

You had the teen libido power play of an Alicia Silverstone video trilogy (with a Liv Tyler cameo of course). Then there was Aerosmith’s keen eye to such 90′s hot button issues like virtual-reality! How could one not be suckered in? But the video and song I couldn’t get enough of was Livin’ On the Edge! That video is so over the top “lets make it resonate with 90s teens” retarded that it’s amazing! Eddie Furlong, doing his John Conner meets Jeremy impression, catholic school girl field hockey delinquents, a teacher in drag, air-bag joy rides, that weird green dude that pops out of a naked Steven Tyler and of course Joe Perry playing chicken with a locomotive. Now that’s a music video!

Interpol’s Turn On the Bright Lights basically en capsulizes everything this list is about, a delectably crafted hunk of cheese you can’t help but sneak nibbles of.Let me take you back to around the turn of the century… you know 2000 or so. Interpol were the talk of the town, the darlings of the scene. What wasn’t to love? They lived on the L.E.S., They looked like they should have been in the Bad Seeds, Carlos D spun obscuro post-punk at Barmacy and they “sounded like Joy Division.”* It was a killer combo!

The only hitch is that they sucked balls live! They were boring and had zero stage presence and I totally hated them! I had zero clue why all the music rags were on their nuts and worse was that they were opening for almost every good indie band to come through NYC. I remember being really drunk one night and heckling them relentlessly as they opened for the Faint at Brownies.

Flash forward to 2002 and Interpol gets signed to Matador Records (whom I love), who in turn puts out their debut album at like $6. I said what the fuck and bought it, just so I could have more fuel to fire my hatred. But much to my dismay I found the album kind of engaging and couldn’t stop listening to it. Everything that made them mind numbingly boring live was actually washed away by some really good production which emphasized some pretty strong hooks. And all in all creating a really good carbon copy of late 70s post-punk.

Unfortunately the thing I found most engaging isn’t exactly something that would make any proud! Paul Bank’s lyrics were soooooooo bad that they came full circle into amazing! I couldn’t get enough of them! I would listen to them and go “Did he really just sing that?” My favorite from Obstacle 2:
I feel like love is in the kitchen with a culinary eye
I think he’s making something special
And I’m smart enough to try
It was like someone lifted the diary of some maladjusted horny 16 year old miscreant and set them to music. The fact that these laughable lines were set to such catchy hooks made them all the more better! I found myself with that “culinary eye” and was happily eating it all up!

I eagerly await each new Interpol release to hear more of Paul Bank’s lyrics (i’m quite serious). Thankfully Antics really delivered with more bad lyrics set to syrupy hooks, however Our Love to Admire just wasn’t up to par. The music was flat & boring and because of that, the lyrics could have been amazing and I wouldn’t have cared.

*I never got the whole “they sound like Joy Division” thing. I get that Paul Banks sings in a baritone v like Ian Curtis, so what? Lots of people do that. Singing with a deep voice isn’t what made Joy Division, Joy Division. Yes there was an overall post-punk sound to Interpol just like Joy Division, but again that isn’t what made Joy Division, Joy Division. Thousands of bands worked in that sound. If anything I always thought they sounded like Echo & the Bunnymen or the Psychedelic Furs mixed with some early R.E.M. But what do I know? I like awful albums.

Continuing my series of albums so awful that they’re awesome I bring you the third in the series. Live’s Throwing Copper. Unlike STP & Bush who earned honers as the #1 and 2 in my series, Live never drew my ire or elicited any sort of violent reaction from me in the 90s. They kind just “were” and my attention always passed over their existence whenever their songs were played. In actually sitting down and really listening to throwing copper I was actually kinda shocked that there were 5 fucking bona fide hit singles on this one album (I’m noticing that’s a trend on this list)! I always thought most of these songs were scattered across various other albums Live may have put out and I ignored.

So what makes this album so awfully awesome? Well Live seems to have this magical way of writing lyrics that are so beyond cheesy they’re actually heartfelt. Like Freshman Seminar poetry you want to laugh at but don’t because the kid writing/reading it is a really nice guy. Dude managed to find away to slip placenta into song lyrics! PLACENTA! It’s like that movie that goes so out of it’s way to play on your heartstrings and make you cry, and you know it, find it silly, cheesy, but you cry anyway!*

Secondly, Live sound like that AWESOME (read sarcasm… well only partially so) band from your High School**. I’d like to imagine that had their been a Degrassi on during the 90s the band that would have formed in that show would have sounded just like Live. Like they would have gotten together after school to jam out on their fave R.E.M. tracks and just riff it from there. They probably would have had the editor of the school newspaper as the frontman, that jock type dude who wasn’t a total douche on bass, etc, etc. I don’t know about you, but that sounds pretty fucking killer to me brah!

Thirdly Ed Ed Kowalczyk badass rat tail braid!!!! KILLER!

And finally What the fuck was up with the video for I Alone!?? Where the fuck were the drums that day!? Why is he just swaying along behind Ed Kowalczyk? It’s fucking creepy!!! Wait… did VH1′s Pop-Up Videos cover this already?

*Don’t cry you pussies!
**Live actually WERE that band from High School, no joke!

It’s been quite a while since I did one of these but a recent discussion on this album totally warranted we revisit Awesomely Awful Albums! Bush’s Sixteen Stone used to drive me so crazy that I would stop associating with people who had this album in their CD collection! Or at the very least if I really cared about them I’d try and make them get rid of it and hounded them relentlessly until they did, Hahaha! Liking Bush would seriously distort my perception of you. In my defense, I was like 15 and stupidly pretentious but I guess that really isn’t much of a defense.

Well it’s been 14 years and my vitirol towards Bush and Bush fans has finally dissapated! The lyrics are still beyond awful, the music is still third rate Nirvana at best, BUT being we’re so far removed from the blatant poseuring I can at the very least enjoy this for what it is… an awesomely awful artifact of alterna-rock. I just hope this never happens with Candlebox, I will hate you till I die!

P.S. I’m sorry I made you stop liking Bush! You know who you are hahaha.

Why am I panning an album that’s like 15 years old? Why not, it’s a blog! And I’m not really panning it, I did say it was pretty fucking awesome in it’s awfulness. I just listened to it for the first time since 1993 (or so) in it’s entirety. STP holds the distinction in my heart of being that last band to slip in through the cracks before I was wise & angsty enough (and by wise & angsty, I mean 14 years old) to detect bullshit and the credibility of bands. Man, at 13, this was like if God came down from heaven and formed an alternative band! Equal parts Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden & Jane’s Addiction. 6 bona fide alterna-radio hits… how was my adolescent heart going to resist!?

Go back, re-listen to Core… Like Interpol, the lyrics are just so bad that they’re perfect. I mean no duh I loved this when I was 13, I was probably writing lyrics like this in my notebooks (for my pseudo band Black Widow)! I remember Howard Stern once getting a hold of Scott Weilend’s phone number when the album Plush came out and calling him to ask what the fuck it was about. Scott Weiland was totally doped up, or half asleep (it was probably 5am Los Angeles time) or probably both, and kept muttering something on and on about it being about a serial killer. Fuck yeah d00d, serial killaz & Stern!

I forget exactly when or what caused me to be like “what the fuck is wrong with you?” and totally 180 on poor STP… but whatevs! I get the feeling I’ll probably be doing other Awesomely Awful Albums in the near future.