10 Most Overrated Albums of 2011

The seventh album for Grammy-approved alt-rock institution almost doesn't deserve a spot on this list, given that it was one of Death Cab for Cutie's least acclaimed albums. In many quarters, the latest record for Ben Gibbard and co was welcomed with a tepid 'meh,' barely earning any of the disproportionate acclaim that defines overrated. Yet, in hindsight, this tepid reaction wasn't quite tepid enough; my own two-and-a-half stars feeling way too generous. Rivaling only the gross Plans for the worst record in Death Cab's career, Codes and Keys is symbolized by the fact that it came boasting sanctimonious lovesongs dedicated to Gibbard's wife, yet six months later Gibbard was divorced; the LP all talk, little emotional truth.

9.3! There, I said it. I wasn't going to mention those omnipresent internet overlords of the out-of-ten scoring system; lest this list come off as 'Top 10 Albums Pitchfork Put Their Billion-Dollar Brand-Name Behind That Were Actually Kinda Crappy.' But the way-over-the-top score handed out to the sad second record for San Francisco's Girls needs to be called out by number. To my outta-five ears, it was worth no more than 2.0. Alarm bells first sounded when the first single, "Vomit," turned out to be an old song passed over for the first album, dusted off and decked out in six-and-a-half-minute choir-and-church-organ grandeur. That set the pattern for Father, Son, Holy Ghost: massive arrangements stacked on utterly uninspired songs in a failed, dismal attempt at 'greatness.'

The direction of Lykke Li's second album was comically telegraphed when its first press photos were sent out boasting this big frowny face. Now an all-grown-up 25, Li Lykke Timotej Zachrisson was now a serious artist. Serious, in this case, meaning very, very sad. Where her sparkling debut, Youth Novels, playfully wed upbeat pop with lyrical darkness, Wounded Rhymes wore its woe in its black-and-white photography and maudlin, doom-laden piano balladry. Plenty of pundits bought into the 'serious' myth peddled here, with sadsack lyrics and expensive music videos seen as evidence of evolution. Yet it was all so sophomoric and po-faced that, really, the LP was kind of embarrassing.

Twee heroes The Pains of Being Pure at Heart were, from the moment they broke out in 2009, obviously utter indie nerds. And, like any indie nerds, when met with unexpected success, they turned their new largesse into a chance to work with their studio heroes, recruiting key shoegaze figures Flood and Alan Moulder to work on their second LP, Belong. they gave a big, bold, slickly-produced sheen to Pains' once-trebly pop-songs. It wasn't any kind of change of pace or direction, yet the slight bump in fidelity fell flat; the combo's past meek, bedroom-pop charms forsaken for misplaced sonic heft. You could eulogize Belong thusly: going from Field Mice to Smashing Pumpkins homage was never going to end well.

Annie Clark has always made heady music: comically self-aware, sonically complex, blessed with bonafide chops. But, on Strange Mercy, her third St. Vincent album, Clark crossed over to outright chin-scratchin'. The melody and choruses are a ruse: the LP all detail, density, and studio nerdery, filled with wacky compositional tricks, fretboard gymnastics, and wild warbling. Lead single "Surgeon" set the spirit: incisively ironic lyrics matched to advanced-listening arrangements; a synthy ballad attacked from within —by wild West African guitar licks, tone-perverting effects, furious flute filigrees, discordant orchestral whorls— whilst gearing up through increasingly frantic time signatures. It's intellectually engaging, but emotionally neutered. And this eggheadishness makes listening to Strange Mercy more like work than leisure.

After the comic, completely disproportionate praise that was heaped on TV on the Radio's prior discography —2004's Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes; 2006's Return to Cookie Mountain; 2008's Dear Science— it feels weird to single out Nine Types of Light for overpraise. Given that, for the first time in the career, TVOTR met with a sense of mild disappointment. Yet, even though their fourth LP found the band taming their ambition and settling into their commercial-funk-rock fate, their rep as Important American Rock Band carried over, and many quarters still feted its supposed greatness. To me, that greatness is absent, both here and throughout that prior discography.

On their first two EPs, Vampires with Dreaming Kids and Color Your Life, Twin Sister skipped across genres; the two discs' ten collected songs never settling on any specific style. This made them perfect blog fodder: individual MP3s isolated and disseminated out of context. But, when the Long Island outfit turned the same trick on their debut album, In Heaven, the effect was different; the scattershot approach creating a schizophrenic listening experience that never allows the album to cohere. Of course, this criticism wouldn't be a criticism if the genre-hopping jams were better; or, even, if Twin Sister seemed committed to making manic, style-shifting their metier. As it is, they land somewhere in the mediocre middle, both as songwriters and conceptualists.

Wildly hyped by the English music press from the moment they played their first show, The Vaccines were feted for greatness most ill-deserved. Essentially pressed into service to fill a Libertines-sized void in the NME, the band were sold as debauched rock'n'roll, but their debut album is mere landfill indie dressed in a pre-faded Ramones t-shirt. Rather than raw and in-the-red, their overproduced songs have a dodgy digital sheen; with heavy compression and surreptitious synths softening their adolescent anthems for commercial radio play. In the end, What Did You Expect from The Vaccines? plays as a cautionary tale on hype; chronicling the audio misadventures of a band fast-tracked for fame well before their time, only to become jaded, apologetic corporate-rock stooges before they'd even finished their first LP.

"My instinct was to change, keep people on their toes," Washed Out's Ernest Greene told me about a year ago, "[but] it didn't make sense to have this drastic change already." And therein the chillwave originator foreshadowed the mediocrity that would be waiting on Within and Without, the debut Washed Out LP. Where Greene's pal Toro y Moi has proved himself a musical polymath headed for a shape-shifting career, here Mr. Washed Out hits a single mood —watery synths and bubbly effects swamped in echo-draped vocals and muddied drum programming— and stays put. There's no variation in sound, timbre, nor tempo; no high points, crescendos, jarring shocks, nor surprises; no moments, indeed, to keep people on their toes. If it were better, the album might play as singular study; instead, it just comes across as dull.

Yuck are very much a band built for an 'overrated' list. Because, in and of themselves, there's nothing wrong with the British alt-rock revivalists, who attempt to authentically recreate the sound of the American underground circa 1991; riffing on Sonic Youth, Sebadoh, Dinosaur Jr, Yo La Tengo et al via white-hot guitar noise and barreling indie-rock klang. There's notable novelty in a crew of kids barely born in The Year Punk Broke bringing back faded superfuzz sounds, but the fact that Yuck's self-titled LP has been all over album-of-the-year lists is crazy. Sure, it's far fresher to recreate 1991 than 1968, but the sentiment is still the same: this is people buying into collective cultural nostalgia, playing out the tired fantasy that someone else's past was somehow superior to one's own present.