Bad Album Titles: They’re Even More Fun To List Than Bad Album Covers

Coldplay’s forthcoming Viva la Vida, or Death and All His Friends has the Guardian moaning about the curse of the bad album title, raising the spectre of the Smashing Pumpkins’ Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, Fiona Apple’s When The Pawn…, and Public Enemy’s Muse Sick-n-Hour Mess Age to make the case that Vida‘s awkward title will probably sink the album, sales-wise. (Well, at least EMI will have something else to blame for the inevitably disappointing numbers besides “softening market conditions.”) But surely we’ve all bought unfortunately titled albums in an effort to look past awkward syntax and bad puns by musicians whose output we trust? I know I have, so after the jump, I run down five owned-by-me full-lengths that I generally only refer to as “that album by those guys, you know which one I mean.” (For what it’s worth, the best-titled in my collection is Ill Ease’s All Systems A-Go-Go!, but that particular honor can change at any moment.)

5. Metrotone, The Less You Have, The More You Are. A not-little-enough bit of undergraduate pretension that may inadvertently explain why I kept running into this album in used bins all over the place.

4. Sukpatch, Haulin’ Grass And Smokin’ Ass. Lovely album, pity about the name. Also, how has Snoop Dogg not repurposed this title for his own purposes yet?

3. Robbie Williams, The Ego Has Landed. The self-deprecation might have worked a little better if a) the title was half as witty as that bestowed upon Butch Walker’s Left Of Self-Centered; b) Ego hadn’t actually crash-landed on American shores.

2. Extreme, Extreme III Sides To Every Story. It’s always the albums with the roman numeral for “three” in the title that trip up Gary Cherone, isn’t it?

1. Electric Boys, Funk-O-Metal Carpet Ride. Try saying that album title with a straight face. I can’t and I’ve owned the album for nineteen years. That said, any excuse to post “All Lips ‘N Hips” is OK by me.

The perils of the pretentious album title [Guardian]