10 Biggest Love/Hate Albums In Rock Music History
4. Lions - The Black Crowes
American rock band, The Black Crowes, have enjoyed a long and successful run, since their 1990 debut, Shake Your Money Maker, with a considerable and loyal fan-base, and sales in the tens of millions. Despite that popularity, they are an outfit who have managed to stay on the right side of cool, retaining an independent edge and authentic spirit.
The band's sixth studio album, 2001's Lions, stands as perhaps the sole controversial entry in their discography, with opinions sharply divided. The album saw the band veer away from their rootsy, Southern rock 'n roll toward a more measured, slicker sound, and it's possibly this which accounts for the diversity of the record's reception.
Most of the criticism centred around accusations that the band had reduced themselves to a Led Zeppelin tribute act, recycling well-worn musical tropes from the '70s. AV Club's Stephen Thompson described Lions as “a moribund disaster.” Play Louder's Everett True found the album provided further evidence that “the Crowe's are imitators, and always will be.”
Others, though, praised the band's ambition, with All Music's Stephen Thomas Erlewine stating: “There are few bands of their time that could sound so versatile within the confines of hard rock...and the Black Crowes' kaleidoscopic vision of rock's history is reason enough to listen to this record.”