Overrated Albums of the Decade

Some of these albums are overrated, and some are just plain bad, but since I didn’t make it a point to seek out bad albums, I feel like I can’t really put together a comprehensive list of those. Anyway here you go:


1) Merriweather Post Pavilion by Animal Collective – This album is pretentious hipster bullshit, pure and simple. It made a lot of critics’ lists and year-end best-ofs, but when I play it, I don’t want to listen to the end, and when I listen to the end, I don’t want to listen to it again. A lot of it sounds like what you’d hear if you sat in a casino playing blackjack for 14 straight hours, and you got to that point where all the slot machine noises started swirling together, and you pushed open the door to get some air, only to find that the Beach Boys were drowning in the hotel pool.

2) Person Pitch by Panda Bear – More pretentious hipster bullshit by some of the same people. Part of me thinks I should give it another listen and come up with something more insightful, but I’ve already wasted enough time on this album.

3) Against Me! by New Wave – Spin put mention of this on their front cover, but in the form of a question, something like, “Have Against Me! Made the Year’s Best Album?” It was almost like they didn’t believe it themselves but wanted to make us wonder. And it sounded good on paper: a major-label debut by an aggressive punky band, produced by Butch Vig—this was a formula that Nirvana rode to suicidal superstardom with Nevermind. But, of course, music is no formulaic paint-by-numbers business, no assembly line-type affair where one merely has to put the right parts together to make a whole. This isn’t an atrocious album, by any stretch. But I wouldn’t rank it much higher than, say, The Offspring. 2 ½ years after it came out, Amazon.com’s aggregate of customer reviews has it at 3 ½ stars, and that sounds about right.

4) Super Taranta! by Gogol Bordello – I’m pretty sure I read something that said that this album must have been as exhausting to make as it is to listen to; I can’t dis it any more soundly than that. People rave about how good they are live, but that doesn’t change the fact that this is a crappy album; I haven’t seen them live, and after listening to this, I don’t want to.

5) 100th Window by “Massive Attack” – To call this a Massive Attack album makes a mockery of the name; this is the group’s least essential member enlisting some decent musicians and trying to cash in on their good name, and failing. It's about as essential to Massive Attack fans as a Duff McKagan-helmed Chinese Democracy would have been to Guns n' Roses fans

6) X & Y by Coldplay – This was the album when a lot of us came to the collective realization that Coldplay actually sucked in many ways. Sonically it isn’t bad, although it sounds less like themselves than any previous album, and more like U2; lyrically, it’s frequently atrocious.

7) Arular by M.I.A. – The second album had a lot of great moments, but for my money this one just wasn’t a great listen; it was too funky, abrasive and angular. I don’t find myself thinking, “Gee, I should listen to that first M.I.A. album” very often, and when I do, I don’t feel like I’ve been missing much.

8) Boys and Girls in America by The Hold Steady – It’s just like Springsteen singing about ecstasy.

9) You & Me by The Walkmen – It kinda pains me to put this on here, because musically and lyrics-wise, I love this album; it has a great atmospheric quality to it, and it’s the type of thing I normally really enjoy. But the lead singer’s voice just really bugs me. I’m not against unconventional lead singers per se; I’m a huge Bob Dylan fan and will defend him to the death against his detractors. (Although not his last two albums, which could just as easily be on here.) Dylan’s voice sounds like lightning-bolt energy and sandpaper grit, whereas this guy sounds like someone trying to ape those things.

10) Pearl Jam by Pearl Jam – I also hate having this on there, because I think a lot of their late career work is underappreciated, but this album just doesn’t sound that good to me. I gave it another listen just before writing this, to give them the benefit of the doubt, and there are some good moments on here, but by and large it confirmed my previous impressions—this is too much of the punky Pearl Jam and not enough of the melodic Pearl Jam. Also, a lot of the socio-political observations seem lifted straight from “What’s Wrong with Kansas?” This isn’t a crime per se, but for my money Eddie Vedder’s far better at confessionals than at protest songs; his efforts at the former usually feel like deep diary dumps, volumes of heart and soul poured out on the page with passion and conviction and thought, whereas the latter often feel like pamphleteering, with Eddie handing off to us a slender volume of something that someone else handed to him. I read reviews which dared to say this was the best thing they’d done since Vitalogy or earlier; I’m of a mindset that Riot Act and Yield are clearly superior, and No Code would have been, if it hadn’t been so atrociously sequenced. Sometimes I think this is the worst thing in their discography.