Sweet "Desolation Boulevard" [1974]

This album almost sounds like Mickey Dolenz having completely lost his shit after The Monkees fell apart, but Sweet aren't even that interesting. Campy beyond the pale, only Kiss' kabuki makeup rivals the desperate and moronic stylistic choices that pile up for this band's breakthrough album "Desolation Boulevard." But in the 70s, things were so ass-backward that popular rock music only went further in the regrettable and preposterously overbaked directions of this record, from Queen to Rocky Horror. The harmonies stack up so ridiculously high they sound like a hard rock parody performed by the Chipmunks. For sure, it was an era of exceptionally bad taste in British rock -- the false magic of T. Rex, the brain-dead pub chanting of Slade and the dumb teeny-bopper bait of Bay City Rollers, to name but a few -- but Sweet takes the cake on this album. Amazingly, in just over a year this godforsaken wasteland of soulless harmonizing and shameless arena guitarwork would actually give way to something even worse -- Queen's "A Night at the Opera," quite possibly the worst album of all-time -- so "Desolation Boulevard" and Sweet itself found themselves kicked to the curb. It's a justifiable fate for them, but certainly not in favor of an even more-overblown clusterfuck. Then again, even Queen never released anything as transparently bubblegum as "Fox on the Run," so maybe the arbiters of taste in the era were only mostly asleep at the wheel.