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Creedence Clearwater Revival made four of the greatest albums in Rock history (Bayou Country, Green River, Willy and the Poor Boys, and Cosmo’s Factory), but they also made three albums that were at least comparative failures. In the case of their self-titled debut, this can be chalked up to artistic immaturity (frankly, underwhelming as it is in retrospect, it is certainly far from the worst debut album ever released by a great band). In the case of their seventh and last album, Mardi Gras, it can be attributed primarily to the supporting members of the band, who were really little more than frontman John Fogarty’s backing combo, being allowed to write and sing their own songs, which they turned out to be spectacularly unqualified to do.

Fogarty always tries to shift the responsibility for the band’s downfall to that album, presumably because he can reasonably blame someone else for its problems. But their album immediately prior to that fiasco, Pendulum, which probably did a lot to prompt the internal rebellion that led to Mardi Gras, can only be blamed on Fogarty himself, who apparently got bored with the formula that had made him a Rock legend and started experimenting with other sounds in the most misguided way possible.

All right, that might be a little bit of an exaggeration. This isn’t a terrible album…certainly nowhere near as bad as Mardi Gras (although that said, even Mardi Gras produced two songs that qualify as Creedence classics, the scorching “Sweet Hitchhiker” and the heartbreaking “Someday Never Comes”, whereas this album only managed to produce one, “Have You Ever Seen the Rain?”).

But coming from a band this brilliant, it was a massive step downward in quality from their last four releases, and it served as a visible turning point for Fogarty, who would never again recapture the heights of the earlier Creedence albums, either with the band or in his solo career. Even Centerfield, by common consensus the best of his solo album releases, doesn’t approach the level of the “peak four” of his Creedence years (though it is significantly better than the album under survey here).

This album is often described as the most “sonically adventurous” Creedence album, but that’s really just a euphemism for “the one that sounds least like a Creedence album”. The opening track, “Pagan Baby”, is the only thing here that sounds like Creedence’s normal sound, and even it is significantly less memorable than any of their songs since their self-titled album. A few of the songs resemble a kind of Soft Rock variant on the traditional Creedence “Swamp-Rock”, particularly “Have You Ever Seen the Rain?”, “(Wish I Could) Hideaway”, and “It’s Just a Thought”. This style actually works on the album’s one enduring classic, “Have You Ever Seen the Rain?”, just because the songwriting is so strong. But elsewhere, it just feels like a weak diet substitute for “real” Creedence.

On the rest of the album, Creedence seem to be randomly pinging between every other subgenre of Rock at the time but their own. This is particularly ironic given that this is the only Creedence album that contains no covers…all these songs are by John Fogarty, but most of them seem to be Fogarty trying to sound like other people. For example, he attempts a Funk groove on “Born to Move” and a psychedelic sound on the closing instrumental “Rude Awakening #2” (neither very well, I might add).

Elsewhere, “Sailor’s Lament” seems to be trying to imitate American Beauty-era Grateful Dead, “Chameleon” emulates the horn-driven Jazz-Rock sound of Chicago, “Hey Tonight” has the jangly chime of a Byrds song, and “Molina” sounds like something someone like Buddy Holly might have recorded in the 1950s. But none of these sounds are executed as well as the bands that pioneered them (particularly “Sailor’s Lament”, which is the most embarrassing item heard on a Creedence album prior to Mardi Gras).

On top of that, this array of incompatible styles sabotages the album’s ability to function as a cohesive whole. It’s worth noting that Creedence’s four masterpieces (except perhaps the more singles-oriented Cosmo’s Factory) all hold together beautifully as cohesive, unified albums, while their lesser records are merely random collections of songs that happen to be grouped on a single disc. That’s definitely the case here…virtually none of the songs sound like they belong to the same band, let alone on the same album.

As I said above, this isn’t a disaster by any means…just a sad signpost of John Fogarty’s gradual decline after an amazing peak. But it hasn’t aged well…indeed, of all Creedence’s albums, this may be the one that has suffered the most with the passage of time: Mardi Gras was just as bad when it was released as it is now, but compared with the oddly timeless, Folksong-like quality of earlier Creedence, this album has come to look worse and worse as many of the styles it “experimented” with have fallen painfully out of fashion.

But beyond all that, it’s ultimately just an incompatible hodge-podge of mostly not-very-interesting songs, and despite Fogarty’s own insistence on classifying both this album and the self-titled debut in the same category as the “peak four”, that assessment should be taken with an enormous grain of salt.

The followup to Taylor Swift’s world-conquering, Grammy-winning smash hit 1989, this album came after a two-year hiatus in which curiosity about this megastar’s next release reached an absolutely fevered pitch even from those who didn’t like her music. Despite this, the album proved bitterly divisive even among her fans upon its release, but judging from the album itself, I imagine that was exactly what Swift was going for.

Let me explain. Swift, whatever her detractors may say about her, is exceptionally smart, and she knew that almost anything she released after 1989 was going to feel like a letdown (look at what happened with Adele’s 25, for example). She was smart enough to know that the only way to win that game was not to play…to play a different game instead, and do something that absolutely no-one was expecting. To this end, she released a difficult, complex, almost avant-garde album, and the fact that it failed to match the Pop success of 1989 is a reflection on its intentions rather than its quality. To use an analogy from the greatest Pop musicians from another era, 1989 was her Sgt. Pepper, and Reputation is her White Album.

The album’s sound is largely built on the best and most ambitious song from 1989, “Out of the Woods”. The bulk of this album uses the same mix of sorrowful lyricism and creative dissonance that made that song so unique, only here the sounds are much more chaotic and discordant than they were on the earlier song. This makes sense, as this entire album is built on chaotic and discordant emotions…1989 was an album about clarity and self-acceptance, while this is an album about righteous anger and vulnerability. The music is a mix of harsh, discordant, even deliberately ugly sounds and blissful lyricism, but the dark undertones are ever-present,  even on the most ebullient love songs like “Gorgeous” (‘Ocean blue eyes/looking in mine/I think that I might/sink and drown and die’). “…Ready For It”, the opening track, does a fine job of telling the audience what they’re in for, with a dissonant, taunting verse and a chorus that is pure Pop bliss.

The album’s lead single, “Look What You Made Me Do”, while it was an extremely effective way to roll out Swift’s new persona, seems to have led many people to expect a darker album than the one we actually got. A terrifying mix of eerie piano, pounding Hip-Hop beats and hissing whispers, it is easily the scariest of all Swift’s ‘angry’ songs. It was also the first song of her entire career to really embrace the influence of Hip-Hop, even including a bizarre but oddly effective sample of the chorus from Right Said Fred’s Nineties novelty hit “I’m Too Sexy” (the repeated “Look what you made me do” on this song’s chorus is set to the same rhythm, and it manages to make it sound terrifying).

Like 1989 and every other Taylor Swift release since the beginning of the current decade, this is a full-fledged Concept Album. However, while 1989 resembled a miniature musical in the vein of Tommy or Ziggy Stardust, Reputation is built more on the model used by Pink Floyd’ Dark Side of the Moon, with two contrasting ‘sides’, one dealing her lengthy public mistreatment by the media, the second with her most recent relationship and the solace it provided her during that mistreatment. Still, the growth she showed on 1989 is continued here…she still acknowledges her own neuroses, and she still shows willingness to paint herself in an unflattering light in places.

The other really extreme examples of Swift’s ‘new sound’ are both from the first side, “I Did Something Bad” and “Endgame”. The former is a dark, angry, discordant showstopper that is particularly stunning when performed live. The latter is a flat-out Rap song, featuring guests spots by her frequent collaborator Ed Sheeran but also by Pop-Rap superstar Future. This is Swift’s first serious attempt at genuine Rap (her duet with T-Pain, “Thug Story”, doesn’t really count, as it was intended as a parody), and as much of a shock as it must have been to many of her fans, she proves to be surprisingly adroit at it.

But most of the rest of the album is simply blissful, melodic love songs with tinges of darkness under the surface, recognizably different from her earlier work but not to the degree that many expected when they heard the first singles. Granted, even the love songs on the first half (like the eerie invocation of Eighties New-Wave “Don’t Blame Me” or the exquisitely bittersweet “Delicate”) are still darker and more paranoid that most of the second ‘side’. “Delicate” actually became the album’s best-liked single among the amateur “internet” critics, most of whom had apparently never listened to the entire album and thus never knew that most of the album they professed to hate sounded a lot more like the song they liked than it did like the other singles.

As expected, there are several songs specifically targeted at her professional archfoes Kanye West and Kim Kardashian. Some have accused her of pettiness as a result of this, but people were obviously going to read that subtext into anything she released at that time anyway, so I agree with her decision to address it directly. In addition to “Look What You Made Me Do” and “I Did Something Bad”, there’s also the only “angry” song from the second ‘side’, the witheringly sarcastic “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things”. The latter song isn’t as biting as some of Swift’s earlier lyrical takedowns of her enemies, but it’s easily the funniest of them since “Better Than Revenge” back in 2010.

The rest of the second side is nearly all love songs, whether blissful (“King of My Heart”), bittersweet (“Dancing With Our Hands Tied”), or both (“Call It What You Want”). It even feature the most overtly sexual song that Swift had ever written up to that point in “Dress”, which unlike so many attempts at sexuality by former Teen Pop stars, is tasteful and subtle enough to be genuinely erotic rather than just an embarrassing public spectacle.

This is an unusually straightforward album by Swift’s previous standards. The only track that is really open to interpretation is “Getaway Car”. Now, I tend not to dwell on the significance of Swift’s music to her personal life beyond what she communicates directly (frankly, I think it’s none of my business), but if I had to make a guess, I’d say this was a subtler, more sophisticated version of something like “Back to December”—an expression of regret for something she had done to one of her ex-boyfriends. In any case, it is a thrilling narrative ballad that seems to simultaneously apologize abjectly and shrug off any responsibility, and it probably would have been one of the album’s biggest hits had it actually been released as a single in the U.S. market.

The high point of the album is the sublimely beautiful final song, “New Year’s Day”, which could give “Out of the Woods” some serious competition as the best song of her career. It shows an unheard-of level of maturity for Swift at that point, pledging to be there for the bad times as well as the good, but also essentially saying that if anything should ever force them to separate, “Don’t forget me” and “Don’t be a stranger”. This is in sharp contrast to the angry breakup ballads that characterized Swift’s early work, and it showed that this fresh-faced songwriting prodigy who emerged out of Nashville was finally growing up.

As I said, this album proved bitterly divisive among both critics and fans, but I’m fairly certain Swift was expecting that when she released it. Given her relative stability and level-headedness for a Pop star, I imagine this is the closest thing to John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band or Michael Jackson’s HIStory that Swift will ever release…that this is her version of the proverbial ‘nervous breakdown’ album.

This seems to be the kind of album that’s going to need a few years to settle down into the status of an acknowledged classic, but I can say with a fair degree of certainty that it’ll get there eventually…indeed, it’s already visibly beginning to happen in some circles. In any case, the people who pillory this album as a “failure” are engaging in wishful thinking because of their own prejudices against the artist…it may not have had the same success on the singles chart as 1989, but “failed” albums don’t end up as Year-End best-sellers. The truth is that with this album and its follow-up Lover, Swift is starting to outgrow the singles chart (much like Beyonce did before her) and become one of those “classic” artists whose albums are generally enjoyed as a unified whole. And this is something to be proud of…remember that Swift has said that her real career role model was Joni Mitchell, and so this was probably her real long-term ambition all along.

Styx was not a particularly good band on the whole as Arena Rock acts go, but their overall output is such a complex mix of good and bad that I felt the only way to cover the full spectrum of their output was to review their most prominent Greatest Hits album in full. It’s the first compilation album I’ve ever covered in my album reviews, but again, I felt it was the only way to do justice to the scope of this band’s problems and occasional strengths.

The first problem with Styx as a band is obvious—the group’s primary vocalist sounds like a white Steve Urkel. Dennis DeYoung had his moments as a songwriter, but there are very few less credible Rock vocalists to have actually achieved a major career. Sometimes DeYoung would hand the mike over to his bandmate Tommy Shaw, particularly on Shaw’s own composition, which tend to be far more Rock-edged and which even DeYoung seemed to understand he couldn’t pull off convincingly. But frankly, while Shaw’s compositions tended to be more consistent than DeYoung’s, Shaw’s harsh croak was only slightly preferable to DeYoung’s nasal whine.

The band’s second problem was that they had a frequent tendency to dabble in gooey Soft Rock balladry, and this was a style for which they showed no aptitude whatsoever. Their first hit, “Lady”, was in this style, and in a just world that might have doomed their careers there and then (the song had to be re-recorded for this album due to label issues, but in any form it’s a saccharine embarrassment). Even worse is “Babe”, which somehow became one of their signature hits but which is so tritely-written and badly-sung that the result is indistinguishable from a late-career Chicago single. “Lorelei” is at least marginally better due to have slightly more of a Rock edge, but it’s still pretty unfortunate. And on the opposite side of the spectrum, “Fooling Yourself (The Angry Young Man)” (apparently written by Shaw as a personal dig at DeYoung) and “Miss America” come across as needlessly belligerent and obnoxious.

That said, the band did definitely have its moments…the fact that they’ve retained a significant fanbase in the face of decades of critical scorn is not totally unjustified. DeYoung’s haunting “Suite Madame Blue” and Shaw’s blistering Rocker “Renegade” qualify as Rock classics. And despite their tendency to sound like warmed-over Queen at times, items like “Crystal Ball”, “Blue Collar Man (Long Nights)”, and even the group’s biggest hit, the Prog-lite harmonic showcase “Come Sail Away” do have their pleasures (even if the latter makes its chosen metaphor far less evocative than it had been in Tom Waits’ “Shiver Me Timbers” three years earlier). And while “The Grand Illusion” does exaggerate the group’s trademark bombast more than a little too far, you still have to acknowledge the validity of its message, which seems even more relevant in today’s social-media environment than it was at the time.

The final problem with the band, and the one that ultimately wound up being their undoing, is that their output became progressively sillier toward the end of their initial run of hits. The fact that they decided to start playing up their Prog-Rock influences just as Prog-Rock was forcibly going out of style was a questionable decision to begin with, but the two Prog-style Concept Albums they released in the early Eighties made even the most outrageous excesses of the genre’s Seventies heyday look respectable by comparison.

Their 1981 album Paradise Theater was their biggest hit commercially, but its convoluted Concept (which none of the band members except DeYoung really seemed to be on board with) resulted in some pretty contrived songwriting. The two songs from it included here, “The Best of Times” and “Too Much Time on My Hands”, are attractive enough musically, but they both feature absolutely ridiculous lyrics. “The Best of Times”, a synth ballad reminiscent of late-career ELO, is built around an embarrassingly pretentious and inept appropriation of the opening lines of Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. Meanwhile, in “Too Much Time on My Hands”, the entire song is built around a common phrase (“Is it any wonder?”) that Tommy Shaw clearly didn’t understand how to use properly, resulting in a confusing, illiterate mess of a lyric.

The album that would ultimately kill the band, though, was the legendary disaster Kilroy Was Here (they would eventually reunite as a kind of nostalgic niche band, but Kilroy was essentially the end of the line for them at hitmakers). There are two singles from that album included here: the second, “Don’t Let It End”, is merely another soppy love ballad when divorced from the album’s context, but the first is the band’s notorious calling card among their legions of detractors…the infamous “Mr. Roboto”. This combination of confusing out-of-context story song, anti-technology screed and repetitive nonsense chorus is probably the most ridiculous Prog-Rock track of all time, and the fact that it actually became a hit is what ultimately doomed the band to their current status as Pop-culture punchlines. I’d complain that it makes no sense outside the album’s story and thus shouldn’t have been released as a single, but frankly, it doesn’t make any more sense if you do know the album’s story.

There is one track from Styx’s “reunion” era included here, “Show Me the Way”, and while it is reasonably pretty, it definitely comes across as something of a diminishing echo of their heyday-era work. This Greatest Hits collection comes off as disappointing on the whole, just as Styx’s overall output did, but it has a few good tracks and at least shows that the band had some measure of talent and weren’t outright bottomfeeders like some of their peers from the era. I can’t really say I recommend this album (or, frankly, this band), but I will give it this: it was never boring, and that’s more than anyone can say for the Greatest Hits of some of the bands that succeeded them.