10 Most Disappointing Albums of 2008

With this dreadful disc, the once-inspiring Chan Marshall entered the lounge-bar stage of her career. This second set of other-people's-songs stood at diametric artistic opposites to 2000's utterly masterful The Covers Record, in which she energized and legitimized the often-dubious cover-album concept. Here, the formerly fragile, stagefright-riddled artist transformed herself into self-conscious entertainer, pantomiming kitsch Dylan-isms over songs all given the same stock-standard "soul" make-over. Showing a sudden embrace of the pretence of performance, this is Cat Power yucking it up for the clowns in the cheap seats; a one-time sacred figure trying desperately to be, contrary to her personality, a crowd-pleaser.

The Rilo Kiley songstress's second solo set belongs here if only for its heinous guest-vocal verse from Elvis Costello, from which my ears shall never recover. But, after her charming debut, Rabbit Fur Coat, came loaded with humility and grace, its follow-up smacked of insincreity and ambition. Trying on the garbs of tasteless genre, Acid Tongue mocked up versions of slick '70s singer-songwriter-ism, cocaine-bloated Laurel Canyon sessions, and anodyne blue-eyed soul. Trying on the dated styles of their parents' record collections, Lewis and pals play dress-ups with a thinly-veiled smirk, the result some half-sarcastic pastiche of 'classic' LPs. Though it was a grand disappointment, it wasn't nearly as bad as the album by Jenny's old pal...

Shirking from the weight of making a new Bright Eyes album, that onetime angst-riddled enfant-terrible of indie-dom, Conor Oberst, traipsed down Mexico way to get soused and goof off with his friends. The resulting self-titled set isn't just throwaway, though, but somehow offensive; its smug, self-important self-satisfaction and lame, lazy, countrified cock-rock licks recalling Ryan Adams. The last time Oberst made a solo set, he was 16, angry, and recording straight-to-tape in his parents' house. This time, he was 28, cashed-up, and seemingly middle-aged. Tired, flaccid, and awash in the hot licks of session-musicians, Conor Oberst shows this one-time next-Dylan prematurely entering his Traveling Wilburys phase.

Though it was he who founded Broken Social Scene, Brendan Canning had only taken lead three times in the band's entire back-catalogue. His solo debut —issued under the shady 'Broken Social Scene Presents' banner— suggests the shadows is where Canning belongs. The woefully-named Something for All of Us suffers under suffocating multi-tracking; songs squashed flat by built-up layers of endless instrumentage. Whilst the bloated arrangements sound lifeless, the hoped-for musical mode is, ironically ‘life-affirming’; its forced feelgood formula of drunken-chorus vocals, handclaps en masse, and tossed-off guitar licks playing out like a played-out take on Broken Social Scene's own overblown wall-of-sound rock communalism.

Kimya Dawson had been cranking out fast-moving, foul-mouth'd, silly-yet-sweet acoustic odes for years —both solo and with The Moldy Peaches— when, in 2007, fame unexpectedly struck. When Dawson's ditties were slathered all over way-popular 'indie' movie Juno, she gatecrashed bastions of mass-cultural mediocrity: TV talkshows, the Oscars, the Billboard charts. Unfortunately, Dawson's response to her newfound celebrity was to make the worst album of her career. A lukewarm attempt to crack the lucrative kids-music market, Alphabutt is, from its title on down, one long, howlingly-unfunny digestive 'joke'; a sub-Sandler study in dubious toilet humor that manages to offend the intellectual sensibilities of adults and children alike.

Though heavily-hyped by the blogosphere, Tapes 'n Tapes were only ever a mediocre proposition; their first disc, The Loon, inadvertantly capitalizing on hipster sentimentality for the early '90s with its shameless rehashing of Pavement/Pixies twang/klang. Unfortunately, the acclaim The Loon garnered armed its follow-up with expectations, ambitions, and a hefty recording budget; three things bound to doom a band this barely-interesting. Working with longtime Flaming Lips producer Dave Fridmann, Tapes 'n Tapes essentially moved from the early-'90s to the mid-'90s, recalling that dreadful era when bog-standard post-grunge combos routinely blew six-figure sums on overwrought, overthought, overproduced exercises in distorted power-chords.

A band blatantly railing against artistic limitations should always be welcomed, but they've gotta pick their moment. After dabbling in reggae jams, 20-minute keytone-kitsch epics, and meandering funk workouts over the years, My Morning Jacket chose their fifth LP to wholly ditch their Neil Young-styled back-porch ballads and Crazy Horse-styled country-rock epics. Working with a bank of vintage synths, Evil Urges jumped from from faux-Prince funk to whiteboy soul to veritable cock-rockin', adding up to one big garbled mess. Making this extreme makeover all the more dubious was that it came right when Fleet Foxes —sounding eerily like the My Morning Jacket of a decade ago— were winning hearts with their harmonic take on pure Americana.

If albums were worth only their back-stories, Songs in A&E would be a classic. Three years after being declared clinically dead —twice, no less— Jason Pierce returns with his sixth Spiritualized longplayer, a soulful set whose evocations of those ol' rock'n'roll themes —life, death, drugs, love, God— resound with the realities of Pierce's near-death experience. Yet, minus its accompanying narrative, these Songs sound rather like a mediocre Spiritualized album. Once again, the disc bounces back-and-forth between blustering rocker and stark ballad: the 'highs' mirroring the ecstatic rush of injection, the 'lows' the hollow abyss of comedown. It, sadly, leaves an album that reduces Pierce's artistry to stock standard.

Trouble in Dreams is a pretty-good record done in by one inescapable fact: verbose Canuck songsmith Daniel Bejar was coming off his magnum-opus, 2006's Destroyer's Rubies. After his seventh set did all those Destroyer things —literary lyrical texts, hysterical falsetto-ing, camp piano, searing guitar solos— better than before, Trouble in Dreams fell back to the discographical pack. Whilst tres Destroyeresque cuts like the poetic epic “Shooting Rockets (From the Desk of Night's Ape)” and the Television-esque “My Favorite Year” were impressive additions to Bejar's self-mythological canon, the whole largely gave way to a languorous laziness. Compared to Rubies' irrepressible spirit and unstoppable forward-momentum, Dreams was a meek successor.

TV on the Radio's latest LP has landed atop countless Best-of-2008 lists, so, yes, its place on this list is certainly contentious. But disappointment is often the unfortunate end result of anticipation and expectation. The buzz from day one —no wait, before then— was that Dear Science was an all-time classic in the making. There's no doubting that it's a grand, ridiculous, enjoyable ride; a towering tribute to studio excess and the masculine ego. But, before the disc was even released, gossip had set the bar vertiginously high. So, for listeners, either it really was one of the greatest ever works of the recorded medium, or it was an inevtiable disappointment. There was no real middle ground. And, for me, it was the latter.