Wow, three very diverse albums to choose from. But very easy for me to put in order, extremely easy in fact.
AYNIN is comfortably the best album of the bunch, and the best the band have done since 1983. It has amazing tracks as good as they have ever released, such as The Man Who Stole A Leopard, Being Followed, Runway Runaway, Too Bad You're So Beautiful, Girl Panic, and Mediterranea. And the other songs are almost as good too - Blame The Machines is very cool, Leave A Light On is very pretty, Other People's Lives is very catchy, and the chorus of All You Need Is Now is easy to listen to.
Just dump Safe and Before The Rain which are tuneless and boring respectively, and of course the waste-of-time instrumentals that should never appear on ANY Duran Duran record, and you have an incredibly strong 10 track record. If DD14 were to be cut down to 10 tracks, and they were all as great as those ones, then I wouldn't care about only having 10 pieces of music. Better having 10 incredible songs than 10 incredible songs, 2 crappy songs, and 2 stupid instrumentals. I absolutely loathe having to press skip on any Duran Duran album; it shouldn't be done.
Next up comes The Wedding Album. What incredible songs it has. Some incredibly good, some incredibly bad. It is this inconsistency that stops me from loving it as much as some of you. Also when judging albums I find it very easy to judge the songs only, and not letting my sentimental feelings at the time come in to it. I can disassociate myself from those feelings very easily.
Not that there's anything wrong with that of course; if a record makes you feel good it makes you feel good. And that's fantastic. MOST Duran Duran albums make me feel really good too, and evoke many really great memories regarding Duran Duran and my life at the time. Emotions are a big part of any art form, whether listening to music or watching a movie.
But if a song is a stinker I'll say so, and there are too many stinkers on The Wedding Album in my opinion. As I mentioned in another thread The Wedding Album could have been as good as AYNIN if they replaced Shotgun, To Whom It May Concern, Drowning Man, and Love Voodoo with Falling Angel, Matter Of Fact, Stop Dead, and Time For Temptation. Replacing four ordinary songs (no pun intended) with four very strong songs would have made a world of difference (again no pun intended).
But when it comes to demos and B-sides, and the number of times Duran have left gems off albums at the expense of crap, I have given up trying to work out what goes through the band's head when they try to decide what gets included and what gets left off a record. I have a feeling that often-times a dartboard is used, and that Nick Rhodes is a pretty bad shot
Lastly we have Medazzaland. When I first heard it I thought it was absolutely amazing, and the best album the band had done in years. But as time went by the cracks started to appear, and it is the only Duran Duran album that got worse over time for me and not better.
The main thing for me about Medazzaland is the crap mixing/mastering, and the horrible rhythm-section. You can tell John only played on a few tracks and left, as the bass-playing is very poor by Duran's high standards. The drums sound tinny and weak, and the fills are extremely underwhelming. Overall the instrumentation is a joke, and certainly not what I expect from Duran Duran. Considering that a gun instrumentalist in Warren Cuccurullo was involved, I would expect he'd have higher standards than that.
So the album sounded bad. And sadly there were only a few really strong songs. Out Of My Mind, Midnight Sun, and Michael are all very pretty and tuneful pieces of music. Undergoing Treatment is pretty good and quite fun to listen to. And even though the chorus of Electric Barbarella is pants, the verses are really cool.
But that's where it ends. Big Bang Generation and Who Do You Think You Are certainly aren't awful, but they just drudge along and don't really grab you. And the rest of the music is terrible. Be My Icon is absolutely tuneless and horrible apart from its pre-chorus which is good, So Long Suicide has a nice verse but a chorus so bad it's criminal, and the less said about Silva Halo and Buried In The Sand the better.
When the title track consisting of Nick Rhodes simply talking over music is one of the better moments on the album, you know it's a pretty bad record!
So sorry you Medazzaland lovers (and I know there are a lot out there), to me it is a terrible sounding album with only a few decent tracks and the majority is forgettable.