Bad Buys (Volume 1)

The Awkward Toad buys bad CD's.

In fact, we've bought so many bad CD's that it would take us a very long time to list them all in one blog.

Also, since the Awkward Toad's family has migrated north to Pennsylvania, most of those CD's remain packed away in some box that will probably never see the light of day.

So.

How about this: We will intermittently write blogs about five bad CD's we have purchased as they occur to us.

(Disclaimer: "Why buying bad is good." - The Toad is artistically curious. He makes many ill-advised purchases, but some times these risks turn up gold. The most outstanding cases at the present are Wilco's "Summerteeth", which was purchased by the Toad during the summer of his sophmore year in high school on a complete whim (Irving Longface can corroborate this.) and Queens of the Stone Age's "Rated R" which was also purchased for no good reason by the Toad during the summer after his first year in college (Mofo, holla atcha boy.). Buying bad is good because buying bad means buying blind, instead of just always getting the album all your friends listen to. In short, I regret nothing.)

Now, getting into the really bad stuff...

Emerson, Lake, & Palmer - Return of the Manticore - We'll start with the mother load. A comprehensive, four disc retrospective spanning the entire career of the late seventies prog rock trio Emerson, Lake, and Palmer. This box contains all the ELP you'll need (the songs "Lucky Man", "From the Beginning") and all the ELP you never could have imagined existed. Studio albums, rarities, extended versions (mind you, their songs are already hours long) new tracks recorded for the box ("I Believe in Father Christmas" a true highlight) as well as over 20 pages of liner notes. Probably the worst consumer decision the Toad has made in our 25 years on this planet.




New Radicals - Maybe You've Been Brainwashed Too - This purchase was inspired by the single "You Get What You Give". The Toad believed the singer sounded like a young Mick Jagger and was throughly convinced (brainwashed?) after repeated spins on Top 40 radio that he did indeed have the music in him. Unfortunately it must have escaped before he recorded the rest of the album, or the awful video for the single, or decided on the bright yellow cover design.



Gin Blossoms - New Miserable Experience - The title says it all. Come on, you know this one. You may even own it. Remember "Tell me do you think it'd be alright/If I could just crash hear tonight/You see I'm in no shape for driving/And anyway I got no place to go?/HEY JEALOUSY! This winner came to the Toad packaged with 11 other CD's (including Pearl Jam's "Ten" and Soundgarden's "Superunknown") in one of those BMG 12 CD's for a penny deals. Of course, you know the deal with BMG, they continue sending you CD's you didn't ask for and you keep paying for them because it is less work than sending them back and you think maybe they might be interesting...


...which leads us too why we own...
Helmet - Betty - Don't let the cute girl with flowers on the cover fool you, this is metal. Isn't that so hard? To put a girl with flowers on the cover of a metal record? God that is so hard. (The highlight of the album is a song called "Milquetoast". Don't listen to it.)

And finally...


Aerosmith - Nine Lives - Sure, the Toad went through an Aerosmith phase. In fact, it wasn't until we saw them performing with Britany Spear's during the half-time show of the Super Bowl in 2001 that we realized just how lame they are. This masterpiece, Aerosmith's late nineties "return to form." is called Nine Lives and includes the tracks "Falling in Love (Is Hard of the Knees)" which makes a profound statement about young romance and "Pink" which makes a equally profound statement about the color everyone knows is gay but won't admit it.


More to come...