Electric

Back in 2019, I attended a metal/metal adjacent music festival, and one of the bigger ticket acts was set to be electronic and big beat group The Prodigy. However, The Prodigy's vocalist, Keith flint tragically died a couple of months prior, so the band understandably called out. Who did the promoters and organizers settle on to replace this punky, hard-edged electronic act in the middle of a metal skewed festival? None other than The Cult. While The Cult is, in fact a hard rock, or even heavy metal band, the vibe of the festival skewed a little more modern and a little heavier. Basically, The Cult's vibe was way off. And, long story short, they played a perfectly decent ~50 minute set to a crowd that was just not into it. And ever since watching them fight for their lives up there, I've kind of rooted for The Cult as underdogs, even if I don't really listen to them much at all. But, even with my predisposition of sympathy towards The Cult, this album just doesn't do it. And it hurts even more because The Cult were actually kind of interesting before this. Their first couple albums were still, I'd say, around the hard rock pocket, but with a distinct goth rock slant that resulted in some pretty cool music. This style got them some mainstream success on Love in 1985, and it's been a while since I've checked that album out, but just after a quick refresher, it's pretty good stuff. Unfortunately, after this, The Cult pretty much threw everything unique about their sound out the window, and gave the world Electric. Which is about as boilerplate a hard rock album as I can imagine. I honestly expected to like this a little more than I did, but I just wasn't feeling it at all. I get the sense that a lot of these songs would be fine on their own, even if I'm still not convinced that they'd be great. But sequenced together, they just run into each other and create homogeneous hard rock mash. Even Love Removal Machine, a song I remember liking, was not really that exciting or interesting to me in the contest of the album, even if it *is* pretty catchy. And the Born To Be Wild cover just didn't need to happen at all. I will say, the one song I did actually like was Memphis Hip Shake, which has a really interesting, snaky, start-stop riff, punctuated by a great drum stomp. It's some great, groovy hard rock. But as the last song here, it's also too little, too late. And it can't save this album. I almost feel bad for this, but I really felt like I was waiting most of this album out, and that's never a good sign.

By their third album, The Cult had become a caricature of themselves. This is tired, generic rock. Their second album, Love ,would have been a better inclusion if only for She Sells Sanctuary.

No me ha gustado no me gusta este genero en los 80.

Boring, I was bored.

Not sure why this album was on this list. It was meh, and I had to downgrade it by a star due to the band's rendition of Born To Be Wild - Steppenwolf and thousands of cover bands did it better!

Can't get any more white bread rock than this album. This is god-awful.

Snoozefest

Great to fall asleep to.

Why is this on here? What a stupid waste of time

The first album on this list to actually make me angry I had to listen to it. Absolute dreck

It bamboozles me that someone was thinking of a list of 1001 MUST LISTEN albums and this was what came to mind. It truly sounds like an AI genererated 80s rock album. Wall to wall paint by the numbers rock. Nothing unique, nothing special, no distinct personality, weak instrumentals, and an opening and closing track that are utterly unremarkable. Honestly the 38 mins felt much much longer. Love Removal Machine is not enough to salvage this generic nothing of an album. 1/5

c'est vraiment pas exceptionnel 2/10

nah

Pure Butt Rock. If this album was a person, it would try to spike your drink while you are in the bathroom.

Completely generic Hard Rock

Great album, but total sellout. The Cult plays AC/DC.

I had no idea there was just so much boring rock in the 80s. Justifiably forgotten.

this really didn’t do it for me

Вообще я конечно за любовь, мир во всем мире, и абсолютное безусловное уважение к творчеству, но когда на хуиту, которую играли мои бухие друзья по фану в пятом классе, вдохновившись АЦДЦ, навешивают ярлык "ВЕЛИЧАЙШЕГО АЛЬБОМА В ИСТОРИИ МУЗЫКИ, КОТОРЫЙ НУЖНО СЛУШАТЬ" - уф... Лучшая песня - Love Removal Machine.

It's just not for me. I am not The Cult's target demographic. Album cover is wicked, songs on the album are not. Generic hard rock, wailing guitar, kind-of-bad vocals, especially on the cover of "Born To Be Wild." I was surprised to see Rick Rubin produced this, but that's probably why someone felt like it was worthy of being on this list.

Another unfinished album. Sorry this stuff just isn't what I am into at all.

Oh my this was excruciating. Any subtlety was lost on me.

Like AC/DC but more boring. Originally a goth rock band, the Cult hired Rick Rubin specifically to sell out by sounding more like the popular glam metal and hard rock bands of the '80s. The end product sucks. This includes a slowed-down cover of Born to be Wild which puts me to sleep. Bad, in a word.

Should have judged by the cover and avoided altogether

1 uuild - 1.5 2. peace - 1 3. devil - 1 4. jacket - 1 5. ocean - 1 6. fun - 1.5 7. king - 1.5 8. machine - 1.5 9. uuild - 0 10. outlauu - 1 11. memphiz - 1.5

Wikipedia mentions a review calling this the “worst version of born to be wild.” I think, well, I have to listen to that right now. I made it 35 seconds. It was indeed terrible. Now I have to listen to this whole album with that first impression. Earlier in this project I wrote that I was giving an album 1 star because it was in the bottom 20% of albums in this project. I feel some embarrassment over that comment because a standard bell curve wouldn’t produce an even 20% in each ratting 1-5. (The album did suck and I stand by my 1.) I just noticed yesterday that I’m awarding 5s at a rate of about 1/10. Analogizing from that, I should be awarding 1s at approximately the same pace and I’m not. This was a borderline 1/2 for me, but armed with this new confidence to award more 1s, I’m giving it a 1. Also, “love removal machine” sent me scurrying to my guitar tabs app to see how close that riff was to “start me up.” Pretty close! Different enough for copyright purposes, I’d say, to be fair. And then the singer’s way he sings “baby baby baby baby” in that song is awfully similar to Robert Plant in “babe I’m gonna leave you.” So that song, at least, reminded me of two much better songs, which was pleasant. Getting to “born to be wild” this second time is so strange. I swear he’s singing worse (on purpose?) on this song than on the other songs. If I could confidently say this was a parody, I might like it more. But I don’t think it is. “Outlaw” was perhaps the worst song on the album, and I gave up on it. And I was offended that they called a song “Memphis hip shake,” which implies fun, musicality, and coolness, all of which this album lacks.

Although I like this type of rock from time to time, there were no particular songs that stood out to me. Everything had the same energy. It felt like one long song. At this point, just write one particularily good song, instead of a whole album of mid songs. Could not get through the album.

Type of music dudes on motorcycles blast for everyone to hear Will I listen to again: 0%

No!

I hadn't heard this particular record before. What the fuck happened to this band? The answer is Rick Ruben clearly. They had this cool hip goth thing going and this is just jock bro bullshit. Fuck this album. It would have been like a 2 or 3 on it's own merits. But knowing what they did before compared to this... yeesh.

Born to be boring and derivative.

so forgettable and that’s not what a good rock album should be… and that born to be wild cover honestly sucked 2.5/10

There is zero reason for this to be on this list and for me to have heard it before I died. I am giving this a 1 star in hopes whoever is responsible for this list will reconsider this very basic, middle-of-the-road rock album which does nothing new or revolutionary for even the time it came out.

Not worth spending time with.

Generic

Didn’t love it

Absolutely soulless.

so, a bad ac/dc rip off done by brits? thats… ummmm… silly. ac/dc isnt good enough to even be a band to emulate. i dont think this belongs anywhere but a garbage can.

Honestly really didn't like this. It felt so try-hard, and rip-off and unauthentic. I was surprised because I remembered liking The Cult alright. I went back to their previous album and it was immediately better. I think Rick Rubin fucked these guys up. 1.49/5

Cartoonish rock posturing. Bring back Southern Death Cult.

This is so mediocre, blant, stale, boring hard-rock. They just copied stuff from other bands. Bad.

Generic and bland

1 bu ne ya. ilk sarki guzel devami zzzfest

herhangi bi rock albümü ama daha çok dinlesem severim bence

Awful. Sounds like a fake band that would be playing in a bar scene in a new Wayne’s World movie made for Netflix.

My Ears: MAKE IT STOP! THE HUMANITY

This sounded like royalty free 80s rock and then it went to absolute hell with a born to be wild cover kill me before subjecting me to that again please

Electric The musical growth rate of this band cannot even be charted. They are treading water in a sea of retarded sexuality and bad poetry. This album feels like a joke, as if Spinal Tap never happened. Surely this is not real, released in earnest by a real band? And if it is a real album, how has it been remembered? It’s so poor in every aspect - intention, ambition, music, lyrics - that it feels entirely pointless. I’m not averse to this sort of music at all, but why would you listen to this when you could just listen to Guns’n’Roses or AC/DC, who do this a million times better, with a million times more charm? She Sells Sanctuary is undoubtedly an absolute classic, and I was hoping there would be similar on here but, without knowing anything else of their catalogue, that seems like a massive fluke. It’s not worth going song by song, just think of any utterly generic hard rock riff from the middle of 1987, add some echoey drum fills and some pub singer shouting yeah-ah in three slightly different ways, and mix it up in the most basic of configurations and you have any track on this album. I’m reluctant to give out 1s, but I will this time. This is utter wank. 🧤 Playlist submission: I’ll go for my least favourite, a choice between Bad Fun or the cover of Born to be Wild. I’ll go Born to be Wild as it’s one of the most laughable covers I’ve ever heard

”Be my little angel” -tyyppiset sanoitukset toi vähän läähtätystunnelmaa, mikä varjosti kuuntelemista. En samastu, en viihdy. Toisaalta ihan jees rekalla-ajelumeno. En tosin saanut siitäkään reteetä fiilistä itselleni.

This album is just the same song over and over again. The version of Born To Be Wild is execrable.

What a crap album. How a band takes the already shitty Born to Be Wild and makes it worse is beyond me.

Jesus Christ

Boring for me

Initial thoughts would be... Decent but very basic. Don't really understand why this would make the list, as its not doing anything particularly interesting. Just very standard Finding out about the cynicalness of changing styles to this generic rock sound from their gothic style makes me like this less. Soulless

STOP WITH THESE 80S GLAM HARD ROCK ALBUMS I SWEAR TO GOD!!!

First album that I've listened in the project till now that didn't do anything for me. Just trying to emulate other more interesting bands.

Forgettable af

trash trash hair metal trash

I hate it so much.

The vocalist is a major joke. Just like rappers and their overuse of “niggah” and “motherfucker” this guy abuses “yeah” and his two-syllable version “yea-ah”. Add to that his “baby” and Billy Idol “ow” - also both used to extreme. Now pile on the fast vibrato at the end of his words, along with his making one syllable words into two by adding an “h” in the middle. And the cherry on top? The lyrics are ridiculous! Forced rhymes, absurd combinations without any cleverness to make them palatable, ie; “Peace Dog,” “Aphrodisiac Jacket,” “Electric Ocean,” etc. It’s ALL laughable. The music, though some of it is not too bad, is so derivative that there’s no point in listening to this band when you can hear the same style done so much better by REAL rock bands. This group is a hard “pass”!

Everything I hate about this godforsaken hobby that I have unfortunately gotten myself into.

I'll add this to the pile of 80s rock albums I heard once and will never think about again. Thanks to this list, I finally understand all the people who find classic rock bland. These songs are indistinguishable from each other. Highlights: YEAH YEAH YEAH YEAH YEAH

This is the story of how a second-rate gothic-rock, "postpunk" band became a *third-rate* hair-metal band. Which, obviously, is anything but an upgrade. Yes, of course, *Electric* sold a lot of unit shifters in 1987. But it only took three or four years for this hackneyed and heavy-handed album to become irremediably outdated. And thank goodness for that: it's good that general audiences did not linger in such bland and/or ridiculous territories for years on end, at least. Producer Rick Rubin has been a rather positive force for many acts of all stripes (from Beastie Boys to Johnny Cash). But here, one wishes he had abstained from taking part in such a wreck. Opener "Wild Flower" is still a *listenable* hard rock cut, admittedly. Yet everything after depends on your own personal mileage on "cornball, retro-moronic" stuff, to use the words of fanzine *Trouser Press*... Was about to give a quite benevolent 2/5 grade to this *thing*, if only because I didn't want to judge something *willingly* designed to be shallow and *mind-numbing-fun* (a-hem) in unneccesary harsh terms. But then I heard that cover of Steppenwolf's "Born To Be Wild"... Turns out that it's so BAD that its mere inclusion in the tracklisting took out a whole point from my initial grade for this LP. It's one thing to play corny or vulgar stuff in a somewhat competent fashion, just because it's supposedly "funny" or unpretentious to do so. But it's another thing to be insulting to large parts of your intended audience just by playing particularly unmusical arrangements, or pretending that your dumb groans and rattles could be considered as "singing" by anyone having a shred of good taste left in their soul. 1/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential albums". Which, quite frankly, translates to a 3/10 or 4/10 grade for more general purposes (5 *minus* 1 or 2). Next, please.... Number of albums left to review: 296 Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 310 Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 169 Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 228 (including this one)

What is this middling no-hit unwonder?

Never been a big fan.

Ugh, another 80s hard rock band. Just samey on every song. Not terrible, just incredibly boring and repetitive. The same song 11 times over. Even within a song the structure is so vanilla and uninteresting. 2*. Isn't Love removal machine straight out of the Rolling Stones? The born to be wild cover was mid at best. YOOOWWW

This album is trash. Derivative, sell out trash. They were much better when they were goth...

Dumb butt rock...other older Cult much better. Couldn't wait for it to finish. 1.5/5

The late 80s hard rock is not for me. I get it, I just think it's boring and overplayed. Not interested in this stuff.

“Are you in here listening to d-tier butt rock” —craig 1.5/5

These guys are a Brit AC/DC if you will. This is slightly better than their hair band peers, but not by much. I was close to giving this a 2 but then I thought better of it.

Unbelievably dull rawk, which managed to bore me even as I ended up using it as background music. YAWN. I realise I have given Zep and AC/DC high scores before. The difference is 1) They do it with passion 2) They remembered to include tunes, not just constipated wailing and 3) They did it first.

Trash

Infumables. Volvemos al bodrio musical.

Love Removal Machine //

Not my cup of tea

Wow, this does not hold up. Very generic rock.

I only know She Sells Sanctuary, which is a banger, and not here. Straight ahead rock, pretty forgettable. The book said it had outstanding singles but I completely tuned out the first one so I disagree. Love Removal Machine sounds like about 3 different ACDC songs mixed with She Sells Sanctuary. Why the shite Steppenwolf cover? Pass.

Not good.