411 Music Ten Deep 12.2.11: Top Ten Disappointing Albums of 2011

Posted by C.A. Bell on 12.02.2011

From Kanye West and Jay-Z's Watch the Throne and Radiohead's King of Limbs to R.E.M.'s Collapse Into Now and more, 411's Christopher Bell counts down the 10 most disappointing albums of 2011! Check out the full article to see which albums made the list and why!

Well, well, well, you didn't think the Ten Deep had permanently gone under, had you? We're back and with a slightly different host. Since we are all sick of leftovers by now, I thought taking a look at the year's turkeys might be a good start. But before that, a few beginning points...

Just Who in the Hell Does This Guy Think He Is?

Okay, so I was a fan of this column long before I took it over and I know how nasty the comment board gets. No matter what the picks are someone will think it is too mainstream and someone else will think they are completely out of left field. Every week someone is going to say, "This list should be called (add insulting oversimplification here) who are favorites of this random guy." I get that. Allow me to start the conversation off with some ground rules. First, music is completely subjective. I am not trying to slap your mother; I am just putting up my favorite ten items for that particular topic. Not only is it not meant to insult your tastes, it may not even be representative of mine by the time it publishes. The point is to have some fun talking about our own personal favorites. Second, I want to list my background so that you have some idea of where I'm coming from. In addition to writing for 411music and Earbuddy over the last three years, I have spent time working as a radio DJ, venue booking scout, and owned my own talent management company. I will tend to talk more about Classic Rock, Indie and Roots/Americana. Having said that, once again, not a single one of those things makes my opinion here more important or definitive than yours. Let's try to have a little fun.


The List

If any of you are fans of the show Sound Opinions, you know they do an annual Turkey Shoot for the biggest letdowns of the year. It just so happens that this year they spent a few minutes talking to yours truly about my own biggest letdown (which you should check out here). While I was preparing for my bit on the show, I decided to round out my own top ten turkeys and give them to you, in all of their horrid glory. These aren't albums that are necessarily bad, just the furthest south of expectation. The only thing worse than hearing a terrible album is hearing an okay album that you spent three months pining to be released. So here they are, my top (or bottom) ten turkey albums for 2011.

The Near Misses (or My Excuse List)

Lou Reed and Metallica Lulu - Not enough time has passed to include this and I honestly didn't expect very much to begin with, but have no doubts...it is really, really bad.

Red Hot Chili Peppers I'm With You - If this were 1992, I would have a right to put the album here. This, however, is the follow-up to Stadium Arcadium. I barely expected it to include music.

Bon Iver Bon Iver - I honestly don't think the record is that bad until the last song. It's not 'beautiful', but it's far from a terrible record.

Beyoncé 4 - Honest to God, I didn't even listen to it. That's just not my cup of tea to begin with.

The Drums Portamento - I thought long and hard about including this record as an example about how the exact same thing can be perfect one year and completely overdone the next. In the end, it seemed hardly fair to punish a record because my tastes had changed.

The Ten

10. John Vanderslice - White Wilderness

Let me begin with this; putting together this list was absolutely painful. Easily half of the albums here are from artists whose work I truly love. John Vanderslice is a perfect example. He is one of my favorite songwriters working today, his discography is impressively solid, and to top it all off, he seems like an all around nice guy.

Hence the problem, I really wanted to like White Wilderness and it didn't pay off for me. There is something about symphonic arrangements that makes them incredibly tricky to arrange. They can either add a new level of energy to a song, or they can completely sap it. On this record, Vanderslice fell into the latter's trap. To me, one of his signature strengths is in subtle songcraft. John Vanderslice writes songs that you have to pay full attention to fully enjoy. On White Wilderness, all of that subtlety is drowned out by clunky, out-dated string arrangements. On top of that, the bigger arrangements kept his most interesting tempo changes and Pop hooks out of the question. It kills me to say it, but White Wilderness just sounds like a cookie cutter crooner record from fifty years ago. It was an interesting concept, but it just didn't pay off.

9. Cymbals Eat Guitars - Lenses Alien

Yet another example of a group that I didn't want to put on the list, Cymbals Eat Guitars' sophomore follow-up to Why There Are Mountains is a record that I don't even necessarily think is bad. The problem with Lenses Alien is the same as a few of the records on this list; it is just less interesting than what came before. On Why There Are Mountains, Cymbals Eat Guitars made a frantic masterpiece. You got the feeling, listening to that record, that this was a completely unpredictable group of musicians. The album was full of frenetic change-ups and just about every instrument you could imagine appearing on a Rock record. That was a dynamic record. Lenses Alien is static in more than one way. Instead of following up on their everything goes epic songwriting, the group instead decided to engage in an hour long experiment in noise, with an aped Jeff Buckley vocal performance hiding somewhere in the middle.


Lenses Alien had some interesting things going for it, but even its most interesting moments were hidden beneath layers of feedback or squandered on meandering arrangements. I think if it weren't coupled with the expectations from their first record, this Cymbals Eat Guitars offering would have been a completely fine record (if forgettable). Listening to Lenses Alien, however, just left me wishing I was listening to Why There Are Mountains.

8. Radiohead - King of Limbs

Here is an example of a record that I shouldn't have expected to be as great as I did. Since OK Computer, Radiohead has been a group that doesn't release albums; they release events. They are one of the only groups on the planet right now that still have that power. For me, Radiohead's albums have also been subject to the law of diminishing returns ever since that record. In an attempt to avoid becoming stale, they have constantly worked to evolve their sound. The key drawbacks of that being first, that they never stay in one place long enough for it to become truly fruitful and second, that ever changing sound has become their shtick.

King of Limbs is a record that I just don't care for and I should have expected almost every second of it. The first half is standard Radiohead fare; stop-and-start vocals filled out by static-y clicks and barks. The second half of King of Limbs is the other half of the Radiohead game; interesting sound experiments that are good, but unnecessarily obtuse and will probably never be heard from again. I shouldn't have expected greatness from this record, but I did and it didn't provide. Thankfully, the penny has finally dropped and their next record will not be commanding as much of my attention without an immediate payoff.

7. R.E.M. - Collapse Into Now

At the beginning of the year, the first glimpses of R.E.M.'s newest record were trickling into the media and things looked good. Trumpeted as the return of old R.E.M. (sound familiar?), the new songs sounded good, really good actually. I was fully sold on the idea of a new R.E.M. record. It seemed like maybe the time off and Peter Buck's work on the fantastic Decemberists' record a few months earlier had genuinely given the band that old swagger. Unfortunately, those tracks sounded much better on a first listen than inside of a full album. Collapse Into Now ended up sounding more like a band poorly trying to sound like R.E.M., than the band itself.

Sometimes aimless and often uninspired, the songs on Collapse Into Now just don't payoff. Of course, we now know that this was the last record R.E.M. was obligated to record and their retirement was probably a foregone conclusion at the time of its recording. So, the band members were probably much more interested in getting a new part of their lives started than crafting great songs, but it makes these songs no less disappointing. R.E.M. is one of the greatest American Rock bands ever and their best songs sound better today than ever before. I was really wanting to hear a great record from R.E.M. this year. Unfortunately, Collapse Into Now is what I got.

6. Ron Sexsmith - Long Player Late Bloomer

As I write this, I am absolutely sure I will be alienating some, if not most, of our Canadian readers. Let me say this, Ron Sexsmith is on this list only because he is such a great songwriter. Unfortunately, Long Player Late Bloomer is a record that completely shrouds his best qualities. This is probably the best record made for Adult Contemporary radio stations this year, and undoubtedly the worst record in Sexsmith's catalog. Like John Vanderslice, Sexsmith is a songwriter most loved for his individual idiosyncrasies. And like Vanderslice's White Wilderness, Long Player Late Bloomer is like a bucket of liberally applied bleach on top what makes Sexsmith great.

Surrounded by a languid mix from producer Bob Rock (Bon Jovi, Metallica) and phoned in arrangements, Sexsmith's songs on this record seem resigned to their own mediocrity. He spends the entire record singing in clichés almost as over trodden as the instrumental performances. That leaves only Sexsmith's vocal delivery to provide flavor, and even that is made mundane by Rock's overly clean production. If this is Ron Sexsmith's acceptance of adulthood, I now understand what it is to hope I die before I get old.

5. Flogging Molly - Speed of Darkness

Flogging Molly is an unapologetic guilty pleasure of mine. Yes, their aping of Irish traditionals and the Pogues is more than slightly cartoonish. Yes, songs about drinking and screwing are well beyond passé. Those things being said, I absolutely do not care. This is a band that embodies Rock 'N Roll. They are one of the best live acts I have ever seen, and their studio records are only slight understatements of those performances. Unfortunately, while the group's other records were much needed hammer blows to the solar plexus, Speed of Darkness felt more like a deciding blow at a pre-teen pillow fight. An unfortunate attempt at the Pop Metal sounds that dominate American Hard Rock radio, this record doesn't even sound like the same band. Uninspired and overly clean, there is even a dreaded Auto-Tune effect on the vocals. The most rocking moments on Speed of Darkness don't come close to the worst moments on the band's prior discography. Listening to this record almost brought me to tears, and that is an experience I never want to have when listening to the raging drunkards from Flogging Molly.

4. The Kooks - Junk of the Heart

Much like the release from Flogging Molly, The Kooks made a more mainstream record and completely lost the magic that made their prior records so great. Unlike Flogging Molly, The Kooks are not a band that was that far away from Pop to begin with. The lovable, roughshod Brits spent their first two albums making Poppy love songs that were kept from the realm of schmaltzy by a thin layer of rawness. On Junk of the Heart, there is absolutely no rawness to love. They made the equivalent of a modern Red Hot Chili Peppers record. The songs are terrible, clichéd messes. The instrumental performances are phoned in and stripped down to basic structures by the plastic production. The title of this record suggested that we would be getting something closer to their Libertines influence, yet the performance was in the exact opposite direction. Hopefully, uproar from fans and the record's weak chart performance will prove that writing meaningless music is not the best way for this band to make their mark.

3. Atlas Sound - Parallax

I am of the camp that does not believe you should throw around the term 'genius' lightly. In particular, I try to never use it in the case of artists that are still finding their way. Bradford Cox is a perfect example why. On Parallax, I get the feeling that, like Mike Patton or Conor Oberst before him, Cox has begun to believe his own press to the point of thinking for him, writing songs requires almost no effort at all.

The release of Deerhunter's Halcyon Digest was a watermark for Cox to this date. The album was complete and well worth the time invested. So, after that and with three albums of Bedroom Diary meanderings out of his system, I had high hopes that the newest Atlas Sound record would finally put all of those experiments to work in listenable, complete form. I could not have been further from satisfied. On Parallax, the lyrics are nonsense, the music is meandering, and the production seems like little more than an afterthought. The result is an album of songs that are barely more than fragments. Ten years ago, you would think this was the type of demo reel that an artist would be embarrassed to have leak to the public. Unfortunately, today the amazement that someone could record something so sub-par all by themselves seems more important than the overall quality of a record. In talking about Cox, I feel a little like the kid in the crowd calling out the naked emperor. The knee-jerk Indie reaction to any work from Cox seems to be, 'he's a genius.' I'm willing to bet that ten years from now, I won't be the only one asking why.

2. Jay-Z & Kanye West - Watch the Throne

Putting this record on the list was a no-brainer. In a way, odds couldn't be more against a record meeting expectations. In Jay-Z and Kanye West you have two artists that are huge commercial successes with plenty of artistic credibility. That alone is rare, but these two are special. They both seem like guys who can't fail. Many would argue that Jay-Z is the best Hip-Hop artist ever. Just as many would argue that Kanye is the best Hip-Hop artist today. On top of all that, they have more than a proven history together. On The Blueprint, these two created Hip-Hop history. You add in guest performances from the likes of Beyonce, Q-Tip, and even Justin Vernon, and this record should have been a slam dunk. Unfortunately, Watch the Throne's biggest success is in proving that no matter how much talent is involved, the artists still have to be in-tune with the times they live in.

One of the driving forces behind making Hip-Hop and Rap the cultural powerhouse that it is today was the element that provided a voice to a side of America that had never had a voice before. Jay-Z embodied that voice early in his career. He spun stories that gave millions a common identity. On Watch the Throne, he and Kanye are talking about lifestyles that only a handful of the truly fortunate can identify with. And, whereas it would have read like an empowering battle cry a decade ago, today tales of their champagne and caviar dreams are just as outdated as reruns of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. They come off as braggarts, rubbing wealth in the faces of the faces masses that provide them with this unlimited wealth. Somewhere along the way becoming wealthy because you were talented turned into being talented because you are wealthy, and the result is an utterly empty record of tracks that will only live on equally shallow club floors.

1. Destroyer - Kaputt

Well, for those of you who listened to the Sound Opinions episode, this selection comes as no surprise. Kaputt was, by far and away, the single largest disappointment of the year. As Destroyer, Dan Bejar has crafted some of my favorite albums of the last decade. His take on the archetypical Bowie-era Glam Rock style is both singular and fantastic. But with KaputtBejar decided to try something new, and it is awful. Cheesy early 80's Soft Jazz arrangements with aimless song structures, acid hangover Al Stewart vocal performances, and some of the most meaningless and unnecessarily wry lyrics make this record an absolute mess. As with most of the selections on this list, I probably spent more time trying (and failing) to find something to love here than I did enjoying my favorite records of the year.

On Sound Opinions, Greg argued that he liked this record because he heard shades of groups like Blue Nile in it. I understand what he is hearing, but I think he gives Kaputt way too much credit. To begin, bands like Blue Nile and Talk Talk might have functioned within the general vicinity of this record, but they always found a way to hit a fantastic groove. That is something Bejar doesn't even bother attempting here, with tracks like "Bay of Pigs" floundering aimlessly before coming to their confusing and feckless finish. Furthermore, I highly doubt that a Blue Nile record made today would sound anything like the production on Kaputt. Most of this record sounds as if it was made with a $40 Casio keyboard and drum machine from the age of room-sized synthesizers. If Kot is right, and this was made with a tongue-in-cheek wink and nod, than the joke is clearly on us. On a related note, a part of our conversation that didn't make the show included Greg revealing that Bejar plans on making his next record around the banjo. Let's just hope that's a good thing.





Think I got something wrong? Want to add your own turkeys? Make sure to leave a comment below.

No synthesizers whatsoever were used during the writing of this column.

Follow me on Twitter @ChrisBell81 or over at Earbuddy.