THE WORST NME COVER OF ALL TIME

330. Portishead, 'Third' (2008) Island. A mesmerising trip-hop adventure, noted for Geoff Barrow’s slick, soulful production.

Love the slick trip hop of Third.

357. Sugar, 'Copper Blue' (1992) Creation. Husker Du's Bob Mould discovered a post-Nirvana spurt of accessibility and cracked out the breeziest record of the grunge era, making us all dance to the drownings.

I don't actually hate that sentence, and it certainly suggests Bob's seminal, without saying it.

301. Arthur Russell, 'World Of Echo' (1986) Rough Trade. Pioneering electronic murmurs that hypnotised NY dance-floors in the mid-’80s and beyond.

^^^ has obviously never heard World of Echo.

We love these records so much we got the work experience to write these blurbs armed with wikipedia and a computer without a sound card.

326. Yo La Tengo, 'I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One' (1997) Matador. Proving themselves masters of jangly indie pop, this eighth album included a cover of Beach Boys’ ‘Little Honda’.

If only my band had covered Beach Boys' "Little Honda", we could have had the 326th greatest album of all time!

I don't want to be a dick about it but I do think if you're going to do a big once-in-a-decade mega-list you should at least edit the entries so that they (a) are grammatical and (b) describe the right record.

357. Sugar, 'Copper Blue' (1992) Creation. Husker Du's Bob Mould discovered a post-Nirvana spurt of accessibility and cracked out the breeziest record of the grunge era, making us all dance to the drownings.

Actually did Whiney write this?

It’s never been more important to us that you feel you can trust our knowledge and opinions, and the only way we can achieve that is by being credible.

357. Sugar, 'Copper Blue' (1992) Creation. Husker Du's Bob Mould discovered a post-Nirvana spurt of accessibility and cracked out the breeziest record of the grunge era, making us all dance to the drownings.

I don't actually hate that sentence, and it certainly suggests Bob's seminal, without saying it.

Cracked out a spurt of seminal what now?

Seminal release

remind me how much of Mould's pre Copper Blue work was really, really inaccessible?

Well Copper Blue is way catchier and glossier than early Husker Du. That claim isn't the biggest problem with that review.

dunno, i have more problems with the bizarre characterization of his career path than whether the language is a bit off

glossier yes, catchier no. warehouse is chockfullahooks.

OK OK, you win, Dü crew.

But anyway, writing like this is unforgivable. It reads like it was mistranslated from the original Thai. I don't understand how anyone thought some of these entries were printable.

498. Lou Reed, 'Berlin' (1973) RCA. Few albums manage to envisage the languish and pain that the artist struggle to express, but ex-Velvet Underground member executes it strikingly. Although Reed isn't a paramount vocalist, his abrasive delivery works wonderfully with the tone of the record.

497. Daft Punk, 'Random Access Memories' (2013) The French duo with their latest electro-dance album claimed huge success, full of undeniably catchy hooks like 'Get Lucky' and dance tunes such as 'Doin' It Right' featuring Panda Bear.

495. The Killers, 'Hot Fuss' (2004) Lizard King/Vertigo. The Las Vegas stadium fillers broke onto the scene with this massively successful debut album. It brought us the indie-essential tracks 'Mr Brightside' and 'Somebody Told me' which remain to be some their best work to date.

494. The Cure, 'The Head On The Door' (1985) Fiction. One of the more accessible albums from The Cure, the alternative band reached a point in the career where their sound was evolving. 'Inbetween Days' shows this awareness of maturing, "Yesterday I got so old, I felt like I could die, yesterday I got so old, it made me want to cry".

This is more in the style of Ladies Home Journal in 1967.

492. These New Puritans, 'Hidden' (2010) Domino. In the midst of new indie bands of muddled, reverb-happy recordings, These New Puritans have a refreshingly clean-cut sound thats joyous to hear.

We love these records so much we got the work experience to write these blurbs armed with wikipedia and a computer without a sound card.

― Defund Phil Collins (stevie), Thursday, October 24, 2013 5:20 PM (31 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Notably the entires for 500 to 431 have no blurbs in the print mag.

are these actually for real? i'm scared to look

This clown can't even spell "weird", let alone write a sentence. It's not even lazy boilerplate. It dreams of one day being lazy boilerplate. I know that NME has quite a few good writers so who wrote this stuff?

486. Bjork, 'Homogenic' (1997) One Little Indian Bjork is wierd, but it's an insatiable wierd. Homogenic is a an album of grandiose scale, embracing her iceland roots, and epic orchestral moments that make it such a dramatic listen.

Few albums manage to envisage the languish and pain that the artist struggle to express

I assume that's "anguish and pain", quite like "languish and pain" though

language?

We can't get enough of their no-bars-held guitar smashing rock

No bars held

lasagne and pain

While I agree with most xps that it'd be nice to see some more of the likes of Orb, Orbital, Underworld etc. from the last 25 years overall it's a decent 500. I much prefer it, or it feels much more like my record collection, than the Rolling Stone Top 500's from recent years with its lack of multiple Jackson Browne, Tina Turner and Eagles albums.

It probably suffers from unweighted ballots as two #24 votes are worth more than a #1 which leads to pushing albums with lots of medium votes above those with fewer, higher votes. Which is one of the reasons people find the bottom half of these lists more interesting.

It's interesting to see the falling away of some of the darlings of the 1980s who would poll well on here and Pixies, Smiths and so on do better. Also a more sober look at Brit Pop than happened at the time. A lot of the positions on the list like Pulp and Dog Man Star so high feel like opinions and conversations that have been bubbling away for a decade.

With that in mind it feels very much like the NME Canon for the last pre-broadband generation, those that had used the internet before hitting 18 but not broadband. Being post Britpop and pre-Strokes aged 15/6(which includes me) there's a lot of knowledge of records 20 years older than they are driven by the raft of lists like these from the turn of the century. The 1999 Melody Maker all-time list I used as a personal checklist for shopping at Our Price and Virgin for a very long term. I would hope this list would be used in the same way by today's 15 year olds and they will discover GZA, Gene Clark, Sam Cooke and so on from the panels lower down the list in the way I didn't as I had no broadband and no lists like Q Reader's best of 1998 as my gatekeepers which kept the likes of Kraftwerk, Aphex Twin, Neu, Suicide off my radar for longer.

Like the Pitchfork 2000-09 list is skewed 2000-4 this one is too on recent entries, again I put that down to the last gasp of contemporary records really chiming as soundtrack to people's lives before the pre-broadband gush. It is a bit of a shame it is so Libertines, Kasabian, Killers featuring so often rather than your more esoteric acts like The Knife that dominate Pitchfork lists of the same period.

Compilation wise Hatful and The 3 EPs are the de facto "allowed as a studio album" that tend to be included, didn't see the latter but Sci-Fi Lullabies was on it.

Tl;dr

301. Arthur Russell, 'World Of Echo' (1986) Rough Trade. Pioneering electronic murmurs that hypnotised NY dance-floors in the mid-’80s and beyond.

^^^ has obviously never heard World of Echo.

― Luigi Nono le petit robot, actually, saves Christmas (seandalai), Thursday, October 24, 2013 1:20 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

just amazing

xpost "No Bars Held" sounds like the title to some particularly gruesome record by the Tubes.

World of Echo is the one record in common between this thing and the Wire list. Can't say it does anything much for me though, gimme Loose Joints etc anytime.

is the full list anywhere online in a handy easy-to-rattle-through format?

Page southy.

shall I count the ones I got?

http://pastebin.com/E9b479Uf

I keep feeling tempted to compile my own top 500 list, like Kerrang! editor james jam did on twitter the other day, and then thinking 'fuck me that's a lot of effort for no money'.

i'm all for a good year-end list to take stock but "of all time" seems incredibly pointless and impossible, like i don't think i even care about my favourite albums of all time particularly

I'd just list the 500 albums in my collection id pick up first. I dont keep crap I dont like nor do I tend to buy crap albums based on raving reviews anymore due to being able to preview them in the internet age.

DJ Martian's contributions to this thread are among the funniest things ever to be posted on ILx. And I agree with most of what he says!

349. Alt-J, 'An Awesome Wave' (2012) Infectious. A worthy Mercury Prize winner, ‘An Awesome Wave’’s minimalist electro-folk defined the dark-'net generation.

What does this mean?

346. New Order, 'Low-Life' (1985) Factory. The moment the former Joy Division members left behind their post-punk roots to truly embrace dance.

uh, like no?

Um, yeah, kind of rediscovered their post-punk roots on that one

323. Miles Davis, 'Bitches Brew' (1970) Columbia. Rebelling against convention with loose, improvised rhythms, this is the jazz hero at his most punk.

Thank god Miles finally rebelled against jazz's adamant refusal to improvise, he's like the Green Day of bebop.

Looks like NME work slaves rediscovered the splitting of the infinitive there.

Really, does anyone at that paper seriously think that any of their readers are going to be tempted to listen to any of these records with writing this abysmal?

Why don't they just wave the white flag and say, we can't compete with the internet so let's not even bother?

Thinking about it they might have been better off rolling this out slowly, over a period of months, and going into each record in more than one sentence, rather than splurging it out in one. Would have sold more copies, almost certainly.

If they'd done just ten albums a week, for instance, they could have had this list run the whole year, with the top ten in the Christmas issue. The writing would almost certainly have been better and they absolutely would have sold way more copies in general.

and it would have given people a chance to listen along as it were

Bjork is wierd, but it's an insatiable wierd.

I don't know what's worse, that "lol nutty woman being nutty" was deemed adequate commentary or that apparently neither the writer nor the subeditor could spell "weird".

"Star" by Belly was arguably the first album I was obsessed with (certainly the first to be an entirely private obsession not shared by any of my friends), so it was nice to see it squeak in at #499 but now I'm a little scared to read the blurb.

(lol at stevie's all too accurate summary, I didn't mind the Copper Blue blurb despite the babelfishy ending but Third, World of Echo, YLT in proper "here's what someone down the student union bar told me about a band I've never heard" territory)

That would have been a great idea marcello

OK I was also pleased to see Stankonia in at 500 until I read the blurb, which starts:
"500. Outkast, 'Stankonia' (2000) LaFace Records. Canadian electro producer Grimes comments ''I really enjoyed Outkast as a kid, I don't know why."

So much for thinking that someone at the NME chose it, or that they could find a less "will this do?" quote.

Not sure I can bear to click through 500 ad-laden pages just to wince at the prose, so if anyone else can please continue to paste the worst bits here.

It does look like it was outsourced to a data mining company tasked with looking at other references to the artists on the website and compiling a semi-randomised blurb based on the results.

I thought they might be culled from reader reviews on the NME website (not sure if that's still a thing) but the readers in question shouldn't have got them so wrong. It's difficult to believe that a work experience kid would make so many odd mistakes.

Huh. That's actually quite plausible. Ugh.

(And the kind of thing which sounds like an interesting computational challenge until you remember that the only uses for it are to be an evil SEO pagerank-cheat or to make actual online content from publications who should know better that much shittier)