There’s a certain art to a good debut.

On the one hand, the debut has to be captivating enough that it can stand as a self sufficient statement on its own. On the other, there has to be enough untapped potential to keep future releases from getting stale. It’s generally a bad idea to just keep releasing the same record over and over again.

But sometimes, even great artists whiff it at their first at-bat. In fact, some of the artists responsible for some of the most gorgeous music ever started their careers with albums that barely have even have a glimmer of what they would go on to create.

Disclaimer: not every album on this list is bad per se. They just fail to offer any sort of representation of what the band would be capable of.

Sigur Rós – Von

Speaking of artists responsible for the most gorgeous music ever…

Sigur Rós has made a career on creating otherworldly music that encapsulates and transcends the human experience. Their catalog is filled with the type of music that just makes you glad to be alive.

But their debut Von has only the slightest shade of what they would go on to do. There are only a handful of proper songs, track list largely padded out with formless ambient tracks that go about five times longer than they need to. One track is simply another song played backwards. The band themselves have admitted that they had no idea what they were doing.

Of the songs with actual vocals, it’s much more derivative than anything else they would do. A couple songs are pretty close to My Bloody Valentine worship (which suits me fine). There’s very little of the glacial bowed-guitar and neo-classicism that made them one of the most celebrated bands in the world.

Still an enjoyable album, but more as a novelty than as a part of one of the best discographies ever.

Thrice – Identity Crisis

Throughout their career, Thrice has explored a staggering amount of ground. Between Vheissu and The Alchemy Index alone, they earned themselves the nickname “the Radiohead of punk music,” and for good reason. Whether pummeling through frantic meter changes in rapid succession or playing heavy rock anthems, their discography has remained consistent for almost twenty years(barring a couple duds of singles).

Not a complete twenty years though, because their debut is a juvenile affair that melds hardcore, thrash metal, and skate punk with more enthusiasm than craftsmanship. A couple songs might be enjoyable still, but overall, the album pales in comparison to even The Illusion of Safety.

mewithoutYou – Blood Enough For Us All

I’ve said it before but it bears repeating: mewithoutYou started as a joke band.

While most of them were playing in The Operation, drummer Aaron Weiss suggested started a band “I can holler to” to ape the hardcore and metalcore filling the Philadelphia music scene.

Blood Enough For Us All is a clumsy parody of those bands that ends up sounding closer to bad crust punk. The songs are almost completely unlistenable—especially closer “Song for a Rapist,” which literally features horror movie screams.

Music aside, the passion of their live shows got them enough attention that they (thankfully) decided to start taking it seriously.

The Beatles – Introducing…

Fight me.

Introducing the Beatles isn’t a bad record. It’s got a couple hits—”Twist and Shout,” “Love Me Do”… And of course no one should compare the earlier Beatles material to the complete transcendence and studio trickery of their later works. But there are two reasons it’s on this list.

Number one: this version of the Beatles was nowhere as good as their popularity would suggest. There were a number of far better bands during this era—The Who and the Kinks were better than the  Beatles until around 1966 or ’67.

Number two: only half of the songs are Lennon-McCartney compositions. The rest are covers of various origin (including a Burt Bacharach song. I love Burt, but that’s a pretty clumsy pairing). And of the originals, most of them needed a couple more drafts before finishing.

Especially “I Saw Her Standing There” (I don’t think I want to know what you mean, Paul).

My Bloody Valentine – This Is Your Bloody Valentine

My Bloody Valentine is celebrated as one of the most important shoegaze bands ever. Their masterpiece Loveless used the electric guitar in ways that no one knew was possible, bending feedback and effects pedals into lush walls of noise that are at once heavy and dreamlike, accented by Kevin Shields and Bilinda Butcher’s somnambulant vocal delivery.

But This Is Your Bloody Valentine is barely the same band. Kevin is on guitar duties, and Colm Ó Cíosóig is drumming, but the rest of the lineup is different. They’re led by vocalist David Conway, who sneers his way through seven gothy, post-punky garage rock songs. Hard pass.

Alcest – Tristesse Hivernale

Before Neige became the God-King of the blackgaze movement with Alcest, he jumped around between several projects in the French black metal scene.

The first of these bands was called, oddly enough, Alcest, a traditional black metal project for which a sixteen-year-old Neige played bass. It might not technically be the same project, as he merely co-opted the name for his solo project years later. But it’s included in Alcest’s Wikipedia page, and so it’s good enough for my purposes here.

While Neige’s fascination with new wave, dream pop, shoegaze, and post rock has bled into nearly all of Neige’s projects, it is entirely absent here. Instead, it’s a church-burning mosh of harsh shrieks, tremolo guitars, and blast beats that bears absolutely no resemblance to the project that would bear the name later.

It also doesn’t help that the recording sounds like absolute trash.

Talk Talk – The Party’s Over

Talk Talk’s career is one of the most interesting musical evolutions in music history. They found success playing thoughtful synthpop (“It’s My Life,” for instance), and went on to become pioneers of what would be known as post rock.

But their debut is a cheesy, uninspired synthpop record that finds the band wishing they were Duran Duran. Not a great starting point.

David Bowie – David Bowie

No, I don’t mean the album also known as Space Oddity that is usually treated like Bowie’s debut. Two years before, the Man Who Fell To Earth made a previous attempt at a music career…but with absolutely none of his trademark charm and otherworldliness.

This album jumps from the almost Vaudevillian style of Richard Harris to a sort of lounge Elvis Presley. It seems to serve more as a resume for his manager at the time who advertised him as an “all around entertainer” than the rock god he would become.

The Flaming Lips – Hear It Is

Few discographies are as diverse and rewarding as The Flaming Lips‘. From the shimmering space pop of The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots to the psych noise of In a Priest Driven Ambulance to the frantic space station freakout of Embryonic and The Terror—as well as dozens of cover albums and just-for-fun releases, few bands can match the Lips in terms of either quality or quantity of output.

None of that could have been guessed by Hear It Is, their 1986 debut allegedly recorded on instruments stolen from a local church. Wayne Coyne leads the greenhorn group through forty-seven minutes of throwing stuff against the wall and seeing what sticks. There are moments of aggressive garage rock, late-70s NYC punk, and Syd Barret worship. It has moments of listenability, but it’s so wildly uneven an album that it’s almost unbearable. A few of the songs showcase a decent talent for songcraft, but they’re usually interrupted by chaotic electric guitar freakout before it can get its hooks in.

Lyrically, it’s even more uneven. Flaming Lips have never really been celebrated for the complexity of their lyricism, but a lot of this is barely a step ahead of the pseudo-intellectualism you might find scrawled on a bathroom stall.

Deftones – Adrenaline

Again: fight me.

Deftones have spent the last twenty years combining alternative metal with dream pop and shoegaze, which has made them one of the most consistent and rewarding bands at any level (and they’re still doing it!).

Despite their reputation, I ignored Deftones for the first two decades of their career because I always heard their name tossed around with the likes of Korn and Limp Bizkit.

Listening to Adrenaline, it’s easy to see why. Their debut has every misstep of the mid-to-late 90s nu-metal scene: uninspired funk fusion, terrible guitar tone (was this recorded in a swimming pool?!), and rap verse. 

There are a couple softer moments that betray Chino’s love of The Cure and Cocteau Twins, but they’re too far and few between and trapped between angsty aggression to be palatable.

Sunny Day Real Estate – Flatland Spider/The Onlies

Did you know Jeremy Enigk wasn’t a founding member of Sunny Day Real Estate?

Before he joined, they were a three-piece led by Dan Hoerner, and they recorded exactly one release with this lineup, which leans far closer to aggressive grunge than the intricate alternative that would go on to lay the blueprint for so much of emo’s second wave (oh God, there’s even a funk interlude).

ISIS – Celestial

Few bands have had a more significant effect on the trajectory of heavy metal than ISIS. Starting with 2002’s Oceanic, they infused sludge metal with experimental elements from post rock, shoegaze, and even dream pop. Their subdued, yet menacing discography has inspired thousands of other bands, from Cult of Luna to Russian Circles to even Thrice.

But two years earlier, they weren’t nearly as notable. Celestial has many of the same elements—long run times, extended instrumental passages, and even some quieter moments.

However, it’s not immune to the same ills that beset so much other heavy music around the turn of the millennium. While there isn’t any rap rock (could you imagine?), a lot of the riffs are just close enough to nu-metal to make you think it might be coming any second.

The parts that are executed well on this record are so perfected on Celestial and Panopticon that it undoes just about any reason one might have to listen to this record (outside of sentiment or scholarly pursuit, I suppose).

Thought I admit, I’m quite unfamiliar with this album, and on this listen, it’s not sounding quite as cringy as I remember, so its inclusion might come back to bite me.

Radiohead – Pablo Honey

Is Pablo Honey a bad record? Not necessarily. “Creep” is still pretty dang enjoyable—if you can overlook how overplayed it is, and how so many people still think of that song first when they think of this band.  A few of the other songs are kind of surprising—”You” and “Blow Out” especially.

But does Pablo Honey offer anything that could forecast what they would become?

Absolutely not.

Even in comparison to The Bends, this album is half-baked. Many of the songs feel like barely warmed over Nirvana worship, with Thom trying to sing lines that his voice isn’t ugly enough to sound convincing and certified musical genius Johnny Greenwood bored out of his mind.

Again—not a bad record. It’s at least a 7.5 out of 10. But put the best of this album against the worst songs on OK Computer, In Rainbows, or even Hail to the Thief, and it’s no contest. Lately, however, there’s been a movement on the internet of people claiming that this is the only good Radiohead album. I think we all know that’s ridiculous.

 

 

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