Stylus's Top Ten Momentum Killing Follow-Up Singles to Breakthrough Post-Grunge Albums

zombie

uh Zombie was a huge hit, wasn't it...?

like I thought that WAS their breakthrough single

Surprised to see Zombie too.

Black Love is a fabulous album and Honky's Ladder one of the Whigs' better post-Gentlemen singles.

honkey's ladder fucking RULES

"Linger" was The Cranberries' breakthrough single in Europe, but maybe not in the US? "Zombie" was a bigger hit though.

the idea isn't that these songs necessarily weren't hits, but that they kind of signaled a change of direction or poor choice of single that would lead to their commercial decline. the first Cranberries album was 5x platinum in the US, the second with "Zombie" on it was 3x platinum, but more importantly "Zombie" was a total 180 from the big hits from the first album, "Dreams" and "Linger."

vote for the best (or "best") btw

haven't heard some of these in a while but as far as i can remember them:

Angels Of The Silences > Lakini's Juice > Anything > King of New Orleans > Honky's Ladder > Cleopatra's Cat > All I Want > Gel > Misery > Zombie

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDyxSu2Yv7A

actually most mystifying inclusion in this would be Gel...didn't do too great as a single, but didn't it usher in Collective Soul's most succesful period?

This article is pretty arbitrary about what counts as a momentous "poor choice" for a band. Funny how he calls it a "overly wordy and exclusive category" and then picks a bunch of songs that totally weren't "momentum killing" at all, with a few (most notably "zombie") that did better than some singles from the breakthrough album. I'd really only put "Honky's Ladder," "Cleopatra's Cat" and maybe "Always" as songs that actually maybe fucked up a band's shit. "Misery" and "Lakini's Juice" are chart high points for those bands, and the rest were at worst modest hits preceding bigger ones from the same album.

idk what to tell you guys other than i thought it was a fun article and that i'm interested to see how the poll results pan out, if you really wanna tell Cohen he was full of shit for including "Zombie" or "Gel" in a listicle 5 years ago i'm pretty sure he's on twitter

haha how is saying this article is pretty weak any sillier than announcing it "one of my favorite things Stylus ever published"

Cleopatra's Favorite Cat

^ "post-grunge"

who said silly? we're all silly, man. that's what we do here, isn't it?

btw i think recurrent spins in subsequent years count here more than initial chart peaks. the whole point is that these bands were on a roll when they released these songs and so some of them were warmly embraced by radio at least for a minute. but "Zombie" is pretty much the only one i've heard on the radio multiple times after the year of release.

also "Honky's Ladder" was one of the ones i thought was iffy since Afghan Whigs weren't exactly a huge radio band before that and i didn't think that song/album hurt their standing much if any with critics or fans.

Are we voting for best song or best momentum killer?

Also, a single can be a chart success *and* a momentum killer. Those things aren't mutually exclusive.

best song, favorite song, most affectionate lol 90s chuckle, etc.

Afghan Whigs was straight up "I can't publish a top 9 list"

^^Yup. And Zombie is pretty much universally reviled, isn't it?

If the idea was "flop first singles from follow-ups" I could see more counting, though "Lakini's Juice" "Misery," "King Of New Orleans" "zombie" and "angels of the silences" still wouldn't. Back then, the commercial plan usually was to release a harder first single for the hardcore fans, and then roll out of the pop balladry and whatnot.

xp The afghan whigs def had "momentum" though, and considering the sales drop between black love and 1965 I could see someone saying Greg Dulli's "grunge soul" shtick wasn't the side of the Whigs he should have been humping after Gentlemen

I think list needs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ9kBQrZXOI

I will rep for Angels of the Silences as actually being a pretty good song in retrospect. You can hear the DNA of a ton of recent buzzy bands (Band of Horses comes immediately to mind) that are loved by the same general audience that loathed Counting Crows. Not that that's totally unique.

Afghan Whigs, "Honky's Ladder"

stopped reading here- voted

I can't remember what "Gel" or "Anything" sounded like (not sure I ever knew), but the only songs on this list I know I don't like are "Misery," "Zombie" and "Cleopatra's Cat" - though I can enjoy them in a LOL NINETIES way in the rare instances they're heard today.

I didn't read the article, but on what planet was "Zombie" a flop

man you used to read things what happened to you

Only song on the list that makes me absolutely want to punch someone in the goddamned face is "Gel," so I voted for that. Not that I cared much for Collective Soul anyway, but that song is just GAAAAAAAAAAAAAH so lazy and awful and stupid. It's like they didn't even aspire to Nirvana and fall short, they aspired to Stone Temple Pilots and fell short.

All I know about "Gel" is that xhuxk has reliably repped for it ever since it came out.

"E-Bow The Letter" arguably belongs here, if you consider Monster REM's "breakthrough post-grunge" album, which it kinda was

another vague, arbitary potential choices for this vague, arbitrary genre: "geek stink breath"

man you used to read things what happened to you

― da croupier, Monday, March 28, 2011 4:47 PM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark

lol you were the man of letters homie what the fuck happened to you

I've been singing the chorus to that Soul Asylum song to my 6-month-old sometimes when she gets fussy.

i should be saying "aww" because i have sung some pretty goofy songs to my son but tbh dude i'm kinda roffling about the idea of someone whispering "frustraaaated incorporated" to an infant

Yeah, it's probably the worst part of my little show.

i wouldn't call anything that was successful enough to warrant a Weird Al parody a flop

"Lakini's Juice" "Misery," "King Of New Orleans" "zombie" and "angels of the silences"

I'd reliably call these all momentum killing. My objection w/ "Gel" was that it seemed to come before not after a big winning streak for CS

like Gel was momentum gathering. xhuxk was only the first to notice.

are we voting for best or worst.

(also I was going to argue with Whiney about "Abuse Me" being the actual Silverchair momentum killer, but I guess Freak was the first single out in AU so fuckit)

vote for the best (or "best") btw

― corkslovetoscrew (some dude), Monday, March 28, 2011 4:12 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

best song, favorite song, most affectionate lol 90s chuckle, etc.

― corkslovetoscrew (some dude), Monday, March 28, 2011 4:39 PM (44 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

thanx -- I voted Lakini's Juice

Mmmm pretty much everyone in my generation grew with Cranberries and I'd bet some serious money that if you ran a poll on their most memorable song Zombie would come on top. It's definitely their most ubiquitous song.

Last.fm stats support me: http://www.lastfm.es/music/The+Cranberries - Zombie at top with almost the double of listeners than Linger at 2nd.

come on top is not the appropiate phrase is it? end at the top?

xp it's a shame; Linger is pretty great.

I think both those songs and Dreams are all pretty ubiquitous...but Linger's the only one of them that I can stand...

I forgot about this article. I don't mind "Misery" at all. The hook isn't half as annoying as Pirner's hair.

we've definitely established that "Zombie" was the biggest hit on this list and arguably too big to really belong here. i'm curious how many people will actually vote for that piece of shit, though.

Cohen's right: I don't remember "Anything" but liked "Never Let You Go" the first couple of times I heard it.

(but I don't hear how it's "power pop," unless the ooh-ooh-ooh and guitar hook confused him)

Lakini's Juice is great goddammit. I liked Secret Samadhi too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gl6gaF_6Wcs

this actually got radioplay, as opposed to KoNO which I think charted higher on the modern rock charts mostly because the video was one of MTV's Buzz Cuts for a while...

(sounds a LOT more like Live than I remember...)

yeah "Desperately Wanting" was kind of huge, I might actually hear it more on the DC alt-rock station than any of the singles that preceded it that had higher chart peaks

Live comparison is OTM, wowwwwww. Don't know how I never heard that at the time.

no Live song is that good imo

truth

idgtt

'zombie' is a p cool song theres a great mid90s club mix of it i d/l offa napster. bangin

lol
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASQDzdiblNE

^ hurt djp's ears when he heard that for the first time last year

anyway zombie is easily one of the worst songs ever made

by this point, whenever I see reference to this band all I can think is "SARAJEVO! SARAJEVO! SARAJEVO! SARAJEVO! SARAJEVO! SARAJEVO! SARAJEVO! SARAJEVO! SARAJEVO! SARAJEVO! SARAJEVO! SARAJEVO!"

it's like the dour version of Rebecca Black's "FUN FUN FUN FUN"

lol

btw dude I think you should def. do a Better Than Ezra singles poll

"with their tanks and their bombs and their bombs and their guns"

"you said bombs twice"

"they have a lot of bombs"

Now look what this thread made me do
Battle Of The Worst: The Cranberries 'Zombie' vs Simple Minds 'Belfast Child'

wow that live song 'freaks' is seriously terrible.

witnessed a hard house / trance remix of zombie in baltimore at 1223 a few times which obviously wasn't cool. the original was also fine and well-received but i can see it as a momentum killer - the next lp was from the faithful departed, which was just ok but has a lot of zombie-ish rock tracks, away from the tweeish sound fans had gotten into them with. also wasn't o'riordian being generally disagreeable in the spotlight at the time? or more than usual dunno.

Freaks is Silverchair goole

there is also a live song called freaks, itt

"Salvation" was basically as repetitive and self-righteous as "Zombie" but it was also a fun little ska song about heroin

xp oh I remember that song! LOL yeah that was horrible

lol

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KotlCEGNbh8

re: later Live singles, Don't forget "Rattlesnake," though, that was pretty good.

Since when did Spin Doctors become "post-grunge"?

i took "post-grunge" as a description of the commercial climate in which the songs existed -- Spin Doctors and all these bands thrived in the alternative radio format that exploded in the wake of Nirvana/Pearl Jam/etc.

Live comparison is OTM, wowwwwww. Don't know how I never heard that at the time.

To be fair, I think it's a lot easier to hear commonalities between middling alt-90s bands now than it was in the heat of the moment.

also I fucking love "Salvation" - better than every self-righteous Cranberries song that isn't an under-three-minutes basher with a horn section

yeah Salvation was crazy

tbh I still have Desperately Wanting playing through my head

God I hope that Salvation video is buried in a time capsule somewhere

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KotlCEGNbh8

yeah it's upthread. I just watched it.

it can't be posted enough tho

thinking about dropping it on the Weeknd thread

forgot about the salvation video!!! kind of creepy, was it banished to 120 minutes time period

LOL this is the video I want to drop in the Weeknd thread

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjQrYYIl33w

I remember a commercial for that Cranberries record, like a proper advertisement with a narrator hyping it, and clips of the "Salvation" video playing. Somehow just seeing the commercial made me way less interested in the record and the band, it seemed way more packaged and lame that way. Listening to the song again it's pretty good but a really strange production job I think...like very much "of the period" but this also makes it a mess...the ska part in the middle seems to come out of nowhere, whereas I think if the grungier elements (guitar blanket, loud fuzzy bass) weren't there you'd notice all along that the guitar has this certain jumpiness to it. If that makes any sense.

Was that the same record with "Free To Decide" aka "harassment's not my FOR-TAYYY"?

. . . but you do it very well!

I like that song, but the lyrics really are preposterous. "I'm freeeeeeee to decide . . . that I'm not so suicidal after all!" Uh, congratulations? o_O

led to

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxFeesWL5OI

Some of these are weird choices..

In the case of Third Eye Blind, Collective Soul and Offspring, I their labels were following standard record company practice (at the time) to release a less accessible first single since these albums were all going to sell decently in their first week anyway, and then the more accessible 2nd and 3rd singles were meant to keep the album charting over a longer stretch..

So this would be why "Anything" was the single before "Never Let You Go" and "Deep Inside Of You." I don't think "Anything" killed their momentum at all. Collective Soul followed "Gel" with "December," and Offspring followed "All I Want" with "Gone Away," and in both cases these 2nd singles were both on daytime MTV constantly and charted pretty well.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

lol heard "Zombie" on the radio today

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

apparently it's in everyone's heads

profoundly offended "lakini's juice" didn't get more votes than "misery" or "all i want"

Frustrated overrated.

LET YOUR DIM LIGHT SHINE SOMEWEHERE ELSE, PIRNERBOTS

was this a vote for best??? cos 13 of you are nuts

im not a goon im in dublin

somehow i'm equally annoyed about the most commercially successful song and the least successful song doing so well, but hey, 3rd place ain't bad for my favorite