Music I Hated, Disliked, and was Disappointed by in 2010

People tend to make lists of “the best” or “their favorite” albums for the past year. I don’t really want to put in the effort, so I think I’ll just talk about a few albums that I disliked/was disappointed by last year.

Plus I feel like being negative.

1. Sigh No More - Mumford & Sons

Quite a few people seem to really like this band. A number of my friends on fb mention them with regularity and they are described as “folk revivalists,” so I decided to give them an actual chance.

I want to preface this by saying that I love folk music. I am a big fan of the Avett Brothers and Nickel Creek and I have played fiddle music from different folk traditions many times over the years.

Apparently all one needs to be a “good” folk band these days is to play up-tempo rhythms on acoustic guitar and throw a banjo on top every once in a while. Seriously though, almost nothing that I appreciate in folk/bluegrass/traditional music is present on this album. The songs are very similar sounding and none of them display any type of impressive musical skill. Every once in a while some horns come in or a number of background vocals appear but other than that it’s pretty much the same thing for 12 chugging tracks of derivative, occasionally whiney, and sometimes downright annoying folk/rock. “Little Lion Man” is the only somewhat memorable track, partly because it is somewhat catchy and partly because it is the only song to use profanity.

2. Congratulations - MGMT

MGMT’s first album contained three songs that are insanely catchy and probably got a little overplayed at Hillsdale. The rest of the album was . . . interesting. I wasn’t a huge fan of the whole thing, but it was more a matter of personal taste. In other words, it just wasn’t for me but I could understand others liking it.

Congratulations doesn’t contain anything even vaguely similar to the highly popular “Kids.” I don’t even know if you could classify any of the songs as pop. I am in favor as treating entire albums as art, but this effort just comes of as weird and arty for weird and arty’s sake.

3. The Age of Adz - Sufjan Stevens

Sufjan Stevens has come out with some truly great music over the years. It has been a while since he came out with anything, so I was pretty excited when I saw he had a new album.

Unfortunately the album was somewhat disappointing. Sufjan’s great use of melody and strings are still very present, but the album marks a dramatic stylistic change from his earlier work. It seems to me that he is trying to create some sort of indie/industrial hybrid and I really don’t buy it. There are things that sound like steam whistles, various bleeps and bloops and machine noises and beats that for me just clash with the beautiful harmonies and string sections. It starts out sounding kind of cool but becomes old pretty fast. Combining musical cues from disparate genres often works, just not here.

Honorable mention: I won’t go into detail on these, but Transit Transit by Autolux and The Winter of Mixed Drinks by Frightened Rabbit were both incredibly weak second albums following great debuts.