10 Awesome Rock Bands With Terrible Debut Albums

Every band looking to make a name for themselves want to put their best foot forward on their first album. Since this is your way of introducing yourself to the world, you're trying to put every ounce of yourself into the songs you play to give your audience a good idea of what to expect. Sometimes it works...and sometimes you get records like this.

For all of the faults that these albums have, every one of these bands ended up going on to bigger and better things, sometimes even becoming some of the biggest rock stars that the world has ever seen. On these albums though, you can tell that they are working out the bugs of what they want to be. Sometimes it comes down to not having your core sound down just yet, but most of the time it comes down to kids not really used to being in the studio environment.

That leads to songs that aren't fleshed out that much or are being heard under the worst circumstances that you can imagine. If anything though, these albums should be a compliment to how much potential these bands had at the start. Since they were able to get over these kind of conditions, than they could weather pretty much anything else that could come their way.

It's pretty much par for the course for every music critic to have a bone to pick with Styx. Though they may have been able to stretch a little more and define the mainstream side of rock and roll for a generation of rock fans, there was always something about Dennis DeYoung's approach to songwriting that always rubbed critics the wrong way. And on their first album, it's not like those critics didn't at least have a point.

On their first outing, Styx's self titled just feels more confused than anything else, with pop songs sandwiched between some more ambitious stuff that often goes nowhere. Compared to the sounds that they would be making later down the line on stuff like the Grand Illusion, hearing Dennis DeYoung tear through an arrangement of Movement for the Common Man comes off more like he wants to flex his musical chops than actually write a song.

For the dyed in the wool Styx fans though, this is still one of the more forgettable releases of the group's career, especially since the rock and roll spirit of Tommy Shaw isn't even a part of the band yet. There is the makings of a good band in here somewhere, but they had a lot of growing up to do from this wannabe version of Yes or Genesis.