¡Uno!… Out of ten

The 20 Worst Albums of 2012 #20-17: Green Day, Slash, Ke$ha, Rita Ora

Published on December 26th, 2012 | Natalie Blackburn and Jonny Abrams

There have been some great albums this year – why, check out our Top 100 of 2012 list – but of course there have also been some sodding awful ones. Here are the twenty worst of ’em (not including those to have wafted from S***n C***ll’s arsehole, because frankly that doesn’t even constitute music)…

20. Rita Ora – ORA

“You say I’m sick / I need a fix, I need a DayQuil” yelps Ora at the beginning of opening track “Facemelt”, though Rocksucker had to google the lyrics to check that she wasn’t in fact saying “I need a dead quail”, which regular readers will know is how we express abject horror in these parts.

Come on, let’s whip one out for her; after all, it’s the least her fifth-rate club fodder deserves…

a dead quail
“R.I.P.”

Along with so many of her moronic peers, Ora takes aim for the adult market by liberally scattering expletives across the joint. As facades of edginess go, it’s a bit like Boris Johnson nodding his head along awkwardly along to “The Artic Killers, or whatever their name is, wibble wibble wibble”. This is Girls Aloud with extra added delusion, perhaps most spectacularly the commercial-dubstep-by-numbers, Chase-and-Status-produced, unintentionally-hilarious-Tinie-Tempah-guest-rap-featuring “R.I.P.”. In any fair world, it would indeed signal the death knell of her career.

19. Green Day – ¡Uno!/¡Dos!/¡Tre!

One album’s worth of puerile and agonisingly simplistic power-pop (we refuse to use the term ‘punk’ in relation to this mob) is bad enough, but three? Dear oh dear oh dear.

There are, however, some positives:

1) There’s nothing quite as bad as “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” here.

2) The embarrassing ‘6th form poetry’ lyricism of their 21st Century Breakdown LP appears to have been toned down a tad.

3) It’s fairly listenable for the most part, as long as you’re not really concentrating, in which case you may be tearing your hair out after the seventy-fifth deployment of basically the same, rigidly tonal chord progression (yes, like the one they used in “American Idiot”, and for most of their career).

Oh, and we get lots of bad swears. Edgy stuff, chaps. Green Day suited ‘young and dumb’ down to the ground; their present cocktail of ‘middle-aged and apparently unaware of how dumb they are’ is a damn sight less appealing. Time to go quietly into the night for these corporate, sheen-laden hypocrites.

18. Slash – Apocalyptic Love

Sounds exactly like you’d think it would. So, er, good luck with that.

Furthermore, Apocalyptic Love is a textbook example of a woeful album title that its perpetrator probably considers to be inspired.

There are no rabbits in that hat. Repeat: no rabbits in hat.

17. Ke$ha – Warrior

This one will leave you truly breathless, but only because you’ll have spend the duration of the album screaming “shut up, you stupid girl” at the top of your voice. In previous centuries, eminence was reserved for the truly outstanding, the extraordinarily gifted, the innovators, visionaries and pace-setters; Ke$ha is proof positive that anyone – absolutely anyone – can be a star these days as long as they’re willing to yell loud enough, long enough and obnoxiously enough. Love her Flaming Lips collaboration, mind, but you suspect she wasn’t quite the brains of the operation.

Ke$ha sucks donkey balls, and you can quote us on that.

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About the Authors


Editor of Rocksucker and the website's founder, Jonny is passionate about the music he listens to, both good and bad, as well as interviewing his favourite musicians.


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