Recommendations of the Editorial team
The Most Disappointing Albums of All Time (40): Meat Loaf – “Bat Out of Hell III: The Monster Is Loose”
A winning streak cannot last forever. And when you’re a successful recording artist with a long career, there inevitably comes a time when fans and critics are disappointed with a new album.
This may be because a big experiment didn’t pay off as hoped. The taste changed quickly. You are suddenly dismissed as a relic of the past. For creating something so bold and innovative that its genius will only be appreciated in years to come. Or that you simply produced a dud due to a combination of physical and creative exhaustion. The unbearable stress of trying to surpass yourself. And perhaps the influence of certain chemical substances.
For truly great artists, a disappointing album can be just a bump in the road to a long, successful career. Bob Dylan has many albums that can safely be described as “disappointing.” And they only made the sequels even more impressive and interesting. The same could be said of David Bowie, Madonna, Jay-Z, Stevie Wonder, the Rolling Stones, and other artists whose careers span multiple generations.
Rating: Also depends on the time
The American ROLLING STONE has compiled a list of the 50 most disappointing albums in music history. There are some important caveats that need to be made before various armies of fans make plans to set our offices on fire. Or unleashing SWAT teams on our homes. We absolutely love some of these albums. An album can be seen as disappointing the moment it comes out. And later be reevaluated forever.
This mainly has to do with the timing and the critical consensus at a particular point in time. And an album that’s considered B+/A- is still disappointing when it follows a string of A/A+ albums.
Also, a disappointing album from an incredibly talented artist like Radiohead or U2 would be considered a masterpiece if it had been published by almost anyone else. (We had a really hard time deciding to include “The King of Limbs” and “Songs of Innocence” here. But we ended up including them.)
(And if you’re going to storm our houses because we recorded your favorite band here, can you at least do it during the day? It’s annoying when they storm in in the middle of the night. Plus, “The King of Limbs” is damn good. Get a grip, Radiohead army.)
The Most Disappointing Albums of All Time (40): Meat Loaf – “Bat Out of Hell III: The Monster Is Loose”
High expectations for a new one meat loafHaving an album in 2006 might seem crazy. But it was just as crazy to be excited for a new Meat Loaf album in 1993 when he released Bat Out of Hell II: Back Into Hell. And that was one of the best comeback albums in rock history.
The Most Disappointing Albums of All Time (40): Meat Loaf – “Bat Out of Hell III: The Monster Is Loose”
The initial hype surrounding Bat III was that Meat would be collaborating again with Bat I and Bat II mastermind Jim Steinman. But it turned out that Meat and Steinman were at legal loggerheads over the “Bat Out of Hell” trademark.
Steinman was also struggling with significant health problems at the time. That meant Meat had to comb through the Steinman catalog and pick out everything from “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now” to “In the Land of the Pig, the Butcher Is King.” Which was written for a Batman musical that never came to fruition.
The end result is a deeply unsatisfying work that doesn’t live up to the name “Bat Out of Hell.”