Worst/most cringeworthy lyric on The Cranberries' 'To The Faithful Departed'

ppl doing lines imo

I want to vote for them all

Will you remember the lipstick I wore?/This world is a wonderful place

legit best lines

Winter in New York has a certain understated élan

The .38 pistol that killed Lennon was manufactured by Charter Arms, not Smith & Wesson.

oopsie o'riordan

ILM needs a cranberries / dolores o'riordan poll

I love most of this band's songs and there is no worse lyricist on earth

ha I never paid attention to their lyrics. these are great to read. had no idea

I love most of this band's songs and there is no worse lyricist on earth

― who is extremely unqualified to review this pop album (BradNelson)

http://stream1.gifsoup.com/view2/3462645/bernard-sumner-o.gif

Except in that case I suspect he's self-aware.

Oh hey, doing a GIS on 'cranberries lyrics' is a true delight, of course.

The .38 pistol that killed Lennon was manufactured by Charter Arms, not Smith & Wesson.

― mick signals, Wednesday, August 24, 2016 10:32 PM (twenty-two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Ha! That makes it their "Early morning, April 4"

has to be one of the john lennon ones, which to my knowledge are the only ones that have spawned their own thread before now. leaning towards "no longer a debate" for really maxing out the awkward phrasing in pursuit of a rhyme not worth making.

I love most of this band's songs and there is no worse lyricist on earth

― who is extremely unqualified to review this pop album (BradNelson), Wednesday, August 24, 2016 10:45 PM (eleven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I have a soft spot for the first two LP's, but find this LP to be mostly horrid.

I'm leaning towards "You must have nothing more with your time to do/There's a war in Russia and Sarajevo too", but christ, there's no real wrong answer in this poll is there?

"I would like to state my vision."

I have a soft spot for the first two LP's, but find this LP to be mostly horrid.

i like "free to decide," and "when you're gone" is their best ballad probably. i think the music on this record is pretty good and interesting but dolores steamrolls importantly all over it

i never listened to their record from a few years ago. expecting the worst from a song called "schizophrenic playboy"

lol the wikipedia page for "salvation" says that it's been covered by a lot of christian and straight edge bands

"He had perceptively known that it wouldn't be nice, because in 1980 he paid the price" what does this mean omg

christ we had a lot of Cranberries threads

"You don't get it, do you? My wife is Bono. She is not Larry." aka Dolores from The Cranberries and her pisshead husband vs their beleaguered nanny

I thought at first that these were the full lyrics of a single song, which would've been magnificent.

bloke on the floor is the definition of 'sheepish'.

The bloke on the floor is guitarist Noel Hogan, who wrote the bulk of the music on the first LP (including 'Dreams' and 'Linger') and the music for over half of the tracks on the second LP ('Zombie' not being one of them) ... Dolores O'Riordan wrote all of the lyrics and the bulk of the music on this album, Noel Hogan wrote the music for maybe 3 or 4 songs out of 13 or 15 (depending on which issue of the LP you have), 'Salvation' being one of them. He doesn't seem to be a fan of this record, and is on record as saying the band should have taken a break or maybe even split up after No Need To Argue.

*snigger*

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjZgKuBvpPA

"War Child/Victim of political pride/Plant the seed/Territorial greed" would sound p good in a grindcore song

i like "free to decide," and "when you're gone" is their best ballad probably. i think the music on this record is pretty good and interesting but dolores steamrolls importantly all over it

― who is extremely unqualified to review this pop album (BradNelson), Thursday, August 25, 2016 3:13 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i never listened to their record from a few years ago. expecting the worst from a song called "schizophrenic playboy"

― who is extremely unqualified to review this pop album (BradNelson), Thursday, August 25, 2016 3:14 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think if you're able to ignore the lyrics (which is fucking difficult with this LP, I'll admit) then the singles are probably the best tracks on the LP: 'Salvation', 'Free To Decide', 'When You're Gone' etc. But as an album this basically killed off any interest I had in this band. I've heard bits and pieces from subsequent albums, but nothing that's made me think they shouldn't have stopped after the second LP. They're apparently still huge in a number of non-English speaking territories, though.

I was so into the first two albums as a pre-teen (esp the first one, took it everywhere with me), but even young naive me rolled my eyes at everything on the third album. This has just inspired me to go and listen. Still like 'when you're gone' I guess.

I remember being really confused as to why they went down the 'Zombie' route and stopped doing what they were so good at... and no longer working with Stephen Street either, who did a great job on those first two LP's.

It was a big hit, they wanted more of them

What a sad and sorry and sickening sight

Q magazine cited this line in particular as a reason why the album was shit.

tbh that seems fairly inoffensive bearing in mind they have a whole album called 'wake up and smell the coffee'

SARAJEVO! SARAJEVO! SARAJEVO! SARAJEVO!

All together now!

"When You're Gone" reminds me of Paramore's "I Hate To See Your Heartbreak". Which prompts the realisation that Paramore's last album basically was the product of the thought experiment: "what if To The Faithful Departed was the best rather than worst album of all time?"

or: what if we recorded a better To the Faithful Departed?"

My formulation is more accurate

"what if we don't care what part of the United States Sarajevo is located?"

hahaha this is so hard.

TS: John Lennon vs. Sarajevo

Perceptively

Why would

I mean

A shockingly bad band once Dolores stopped singing and started shouting

Smith & Wesson debate for the win.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

I love most of this band's songs and there is no worse lyricist on earth

Alternatively, the guy from Train, whatever the fuck he looks like.

Martin is guilty of a lot of obvious and meaningless rhymes but they're not as tortured as o'riordan's

Chris Martin's lyrics are just banal for the most part, right? has he ever produced anything as indelibly atrocious as "he had perceptively known that it wouldn't be nice, because in 1980 he paid the price"?

Nah, he's more "sky/fly/high."

Like, here's a quick googled Martin classic:

Every step that you take
Could be your biggest mistake
It could bend or it could break
But that's the risk that you take

You cut me down a tree
And brought it back to me
And that's what made me see
Where I was going wrong
You put me on a shelf
And kept me for yourself
I can only blame myself
You can only blame me

And I could write a song
A hundred miles long
Well, that's where I belong
And you belong with me
And I could write it down
Or spread it all around
Get lost and then get found
Or swallowed in the sea

You put me on a line
And hung me out to dry
And darling that's when I
Decided to go to see you
You cut me down to size
And opened up my eyes
Made me realize
What I could not see

You cut me down a tree
And brought it back to me
And that's what made me see

what the hell is this

Martin is guilty of a lot of obvious and meaningless rhymes but they're not as tortured as o'riordan's

Yeah.

There was a kid in my literature class when I was 15 who used to amend his essays by running a lot of the words he used through Microsoft Word's thesaurus and subbing in the longest alternative that came up. The result was, of course, unreadable. Our teacher rather cruelly made a public joke of him by forcing him to read a paragraph or two aloud to the rest of the class.

I felt sorry for him at the time, but that kid had the last laugh, as he grew up to be the singer and frontwoman of internationally successful rock band The Cranberries.

lol

"You don't get it, do you? My wife is Bono. She is not Larry." aka Dolores from The Cranberries and her pisshead husband vs their beleaguered nanny

I remember really liking "Linger" and the first album by this band band when I was 14. Then the second one came out, and for some reason they'd turned from airy and twee to all heavy-handed and angsty, which made cringe. Based on the comments on this album, I guess I was lucky that I stopped following their career then?

This album makes No Need To Argue look like a masterpiece.

Sure, things would change/if we really wanted them to

this is the worst in a way. like for the sheer banality and lack of effort.

He had perceptively known that it wouldn't be nice, because in 1980 he paid the price

this is easily a candidate for one of the most hilariously bad lyrics of all time, on a technical level.

"I Just Shot John Lennon!"/What a sad and sorry and sickening sight/What a sad and sorry and sickening night

this sounds amusingly like a tabloid newspaper headline. or a youtube comment by a senile nun.

after this record their singles would still occasionally be great ("you and me" from bury the hatchet, "analyze" from wake up, oh and especially "stars" from their greatest hits) but the albums are all really shaky. wake up in particular has a song (which was a single!) that is imo worse than anything on this album, "time is ticking out"

Brad how do you even do this.

they're one of my dad's favorite bands

and it's my fault, i bought no need to argue when i was a kid, got bored with it, and he picked it up

I remember really liking "Linger" and the first album by this band band when I was 14. Then the second one came out, and for some reason they'd turned from airy and twee to all heavy-handed and angsty, which made cringe. Based on the comments on this album, I guess I was lucky that I stopped following their career then?

― Tuomas, Wednesday, August 31, 2016 10:25 AM (four hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

'Zombie' is pretty much the only song on the second album that is in that mould, but To The Faithful Departed is basically an attempt to go further down that route.

No one has discussed this one yet:

What of Kurt Cobain, will his presence still remain?/Remember JFK, ever saintly in a way

Which doesn't have quite the clunkiness of the Lennon one, but crams in TWO icons, pat rhyming and empty philosophising in one amazingly bad couplet.

I'm more offended that she considers JFK "saintly." I'm surprised she didn't smuggle Oliver Stone lines into couplets like

"DO NOT FORGET YOUR DYING KING/I thought on the jet plane to Peking"

What of Kurt Cobain, will his presence still remain?/and of course Van Gogh, as you will recall he was insane

Jeff Buckley unfortunately drowned in an incident which occurred in a river/ Nelson Mandela, few would disagree he was an important political figure

The Cranwikkies

That is still better than "JFK, blown away/ what else do I have to say" xxxp

Van Gogh we still hold dear, although he slice-d off his ear, Picasso was an artist too, trabooooo trabooooo....

Tears of LOL at Buckley/Mandela.

Pablo Picasso seemed as though he suffered with his mental health (citation needed)/ though the exact religious reasons are a subject of debate for historians, the Egyptian lord or prince or whatever Tutankhamun was buried with his wealth

xpost yeah probably

> Tears of LOL at Buckley/Mandela.

here too

Brought up on the occasional weird bill thread, but in 1993 I saw the Cranberries open for Frank Black opening for The The. Easy to forget, but at the beginning people tossed the Cranberries in with bands like the Sundays as sort of Smiths-y, but of course only one of those bands went on to repeatedly embarrass themselves.

Crantastic fact: 'I Shot John Lennon' was originally going to be titled 'I Shot J.R.'

Smiths/Sundays/Cranberries an interesting trifecta, as I loved and championed all three album debuts, and then pretty much lost interest in following releases. xp

it's impressive to think that my own internal rewrite of "Linger" as "Do you fancy a fish finger?" still wouldn't make top 10 here

Can I vote for all of this pls -

It was the fearful night of December 8th.
He was returning home from the studio late.
He had perceptively known that it wouldn't be nice.
Because in 1980, he paid the price.

John Lennon died. [X6]

With a Smith & Wesson 38,
John Lennon's life was no longer a debate.
He should have stayed at home,
He should have never cared,
And the man who took his life declared,

He said I just shot John Lennon.
He said I just shot John Lennon.
What a sad and sorry and sickening sight.
What a sad and sorry and sickening night.
What a sad and sorry and sickening sight.
What a sad and sorry and sickening night.

Ah, ah ah ah, ah...

I think that one stings more than the others because it really, really conveys all the sins and shames of teenage poetry. I wrote a LOT of stuff with basically that rhythm and the same kind of forced rhymes and awkward constructions.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

no longer a debate

good thread

You cut me down a tree
And brought it back to me
And that's what made me see

what the hell is this

That doesn't rhyme with tree/me/see! (Also discussed on this fine thread: Lyrical Cliches You Can't Stand )

"Inject your soul with liberty, it's free" sadly underrated, but no surprise given such an embarrassment of riches

...they're BACK!

https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/something-else/id1211820803?app=itunes

But, sadly, no rework of "Sarajevo" or "I Just Shot John Lennon" on this.

And the PR is happy to tell you re the album cover:

Shot by Andy Earl, the photographer for The Cranberries' Everybody Else Is Doing It cover

I hope it was the same couch.

...as Gear's.

Fun fact: the next album that Bruce Fairbairn produced after this was Elegantly Wasted by INXS. Both Hutchence and Fairbarn would be dead within a couple of years, the latter being found dead by Jon Anderson while working on a Yes project.

And his last full production was for some shitty swing revival band, I guess

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torch_This_Place

Curious definition of fun there (xp)

x-post:

...and of course Fairbairn produced New Jersey, for those that didn't know.

At the time he passed away he apparently was going to team up with Bob Rock for another Bon Jovi production. I'm assuming this would have been the LP that became Crush?