Listomania: Seven Debut Albums Not Worth Being Saved By God

We're already started on a big weekend, folks. Earth Day and Good Friday are both happening now.

Plus, Sunday is Easter. Oh, and Passover ends next Tuesday.

Which brings us to this post.

In the original passover story, Jewish families would sacrifice a lamb to have their house passed over by the ten plagues God was dropping on the Egyptians. Among other nightmarish scenarios, if they failed to do mark the doorposts of their homes with lambs blood, their first-born sons would die.

So, in honor of this holiday, we've created a list of seven first albums that don't really deserve the pass-over treatment -- debuts that were duds in bands' otherwise incredible catalogs.

It's a stretch, we know, but bear with us. And, before I butcher any more Jewish history, let's just hit the jump and get on with the list.

Cowboys From Hell got us pumped in high school just before our basketball team went out and lost district. Great album. Way better than their 1983 debut, Metal Magic. This was before the Arlington natives were the hard-thrashing band of tough guys we all know and love now. This was back when they were still a makeup-wearing glam band. Gross.

Nada Surf's career peaked somewhere around 2002, when they released their third album, Let Go. But long before the band penned sad indie-hits like "Inside Of Love" and "Blonde on Blonde," they were deemed a one-hit-wonder for their song "Popular." High/Low, the album it was on, yielded no other hits, and the band was nearly forgotten. For good reason, too. It was terrible.

Born To Run and Darkness On The Edge Of Town would've made brilliant debuts, but, no, The Boss had to come out with this one first. It's actually not all that bad of a release. But the album's general reception did kind of go something like this: "Ehhh." Lucky for Springsteen, and for the rest of us, Columbia Records still gave him another shot.

Twenty years after the release of My Bloody Valentine's seminal shoegaze record Loveless, and the disc's still inspiring new artists to add just a little (or a lot) more noise to their music. But, before noise was ever a factor for Kevin Shields and company, they had a goth thing going on their ridiculously titled 1985 debut, This Is Your Bloody Valentine. Luckily, few people have ever heard this record. Probably for the better.

Love 'em or hate 'em, The Smashing Pumpkins were just about everywhere in the '90s -- no thanks, though, to their debut Gish. The record featured lots of jamming and wanking, and that sort of thing. Sure, songs like "I Am One" were cool in a metal-meets-shoegaze kind of a way, but the band never really had solid footing until their much-better follow-up, Siamese Dream.