40 days from now, 2008 will be over. But I promise there won't be any worse albums than these 9 drastic compact disks. Many other souls could have been included here. Metallica's Death Magnetic could easily take a spot. But unfortunately we have only 9 reserved seats here just like 2007. The other seat will be the king's i.e. the album of the year which will be announced soon! Here you go. The higher the number, the less shameful the album is.
9. Noah & the Whale - Peaceful, the World Lays Me Down: One of the most anticipated debuts of this year in indie turned out to be just some short minutes of junk irrelevant music all sung by a guy who’s not that eager to sing his own tunes. Indifferent songwriting plus indifferent melodies results peaceful the world will let you down because of your stupidity naiveness. Even all those one-take live performances of Noah & the Whale will not save the band. [Read Record Review]
8. Duffy - Rockferry: Just because you’ve signed with an indie label doesn’t mean you can’t suck! Duffy (which in today’s Iranian slang is referred to street girls) looks ugly, she smiles like she’s 65 and she cries not a single bit like Sinead O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U”. And she sings awfully disgusting. Her voice reminds me of Anastacia (another detested superstar). If Buffy’s music sounds vintage to some folks, I quit listening to 60s pop.
7. Mars Volta - The Bedlam In Goliath: Last year it was Clap Your Hands and Say Yeah who proved to have the ability to create the most unbearable sound on an album, this year Mars Volta and his screaming male angel succeeded at that milestone. The songs never seem to end on The Bedlam in Goliath. If there’s a point to all this helter-skelter chaos, it’s least likely to be heard. Pretty much the same mistake Metallica made with St. Anger. [Read Record Review]
6. Snow Patrol - A Hundred Million Suns: Light up light up, as if you had a choice… When this 6 minute hit song was over, so was the whole Snow Patrol career. “Run” sounded tempting and cool. But snow Patrol was desperate to repeat that. But they also insisted on making the same nonsense over and over. When you have little sissy girls' attention, it’s difficult to call it quits anytime soon. Just look at Aerosmith and Bon Jovi. Aren’t they still around?
5. The Verve - Forth: Somebody save Richard Ashcroft facing his delusions of grandeur. All Verve can do with their decade-long hiatus is doing their best to sound like Oasis and Ashcroft to sound like Liam Gallagher. Whatever they do, they do it so so! Whatever musical they compose, refuses to have melody or make some sense at least. I’m happy Portishead returned. I’m unhappy The Verve reunited. As if 90s wasn’t enough. Forth is genuinely a whiteboard with no marker. Pretty much like the sky you see on the album art. [Read Record Review]
4. Madonna - Hard Candy: She could have gone for another Ray of Light or at least something near American Life. She burst into the dance floor with her 2005’s techno-trash disaster Confessions on a Dance Floor stealing ABBA’s melodies and pretentiously showing off her yoga lessons to the audience. Now she’s back, she’s 50, her body is decomposing and yet she doesn’t seem to mellow down. Even Justin Timberlake and Timbaland didn’t save her. Hard Candy tastes like an old woman sucking on a straw that used to belong to Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera. Wasn’t it a good time to get a grip and have some respect for yourself instead of all that posing?
3. Travis - Ode To J. Smith: J. Smith can be anybody! But Ode To J. Smith is technically nothing. Fran Healy and his fellow Scotts have made an overwhelming mess out of themselves with an album who’s bound to stay unappreciated and heavily neglected. What a predicament for a band with works such as The Man Who and The Invisible Band in their career. Nobody needed another Travis album this soon. There was enough Snow Patrol and Keane being played everywhere. [Read Record Review]
2. Nickelback - Dark Horse: I need some help. Maybe only Staind’s Aaron Lewis can answer me on this. What is really happening to mainstream rock ‘n roll? Who’s this skinny Chad Kroeger who shakes up your parties with Carlos Santana going “Eyo Eyo Eyo Eh, Dance on Into the Night!!” and then occupies his album’s time with tunes that sound somewhere between doom rock and thrash with eerie trucking-friendly album arts and then not a single of his band’s hits is actually rock? “Someday sometime, where’s gonna make it alright but not right now. I know you’re wondering when”! Who is Nickelback? And why the hell do we buy their albums?
1. Panic At the Disco - Pretty.Odd: The worst album of the year goes to a couple of dork looking nobodies who claim to have recorded the next Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band even better than the original. “Emo Is Dead And We Know That!” their frontman implies. If the Killers did their best on Sam’s Town to sound like Bruce Springsteen’s Born To Run, at least they gained some respect with it. Unfortunately PATD decided to go too far, that’s why Pretty.Odd. sounds pretty foolish, ridiculous and humiliating. [Read Record Review]
