Trying is the first step towards failing

2009 was a weird year for me, album-wise. A bunch of high profile shit I was waiting for dropped. Sadly, a ton of them dropped like a sad, lonely turd, only to be flushed and forgotten. These are the (crude-ass) five most disappointing albums of 2009. In order.

5. Wolfmother - Cosmic Egg

You are not allowed to use the same band name if three of your members leave and you replace them for a new album. You are a new band. One band member being replaced can be understandable. Two can get iffy, depending on the band.

But replacing three and going in a new direction with your sound makes you a different band. Please quit tainting the greatness of your self titled debut with this trashy crap.

Because your new album sucks, and you aren't Wolfmother.

4. MSTRKRFT - Fist of God

Long awaited follow-up from the bastardized membership of Death From Above 1979, Fist of God suffers from lack of imagination. The first track is hot, a glitched crunch of dance haze with some decent club-friendly vocals by Lil Mo. 1,000 Cigarettes is slightly less hot, a glitched warp of disco haze with some decent club-friendly vocals by... a cowbell. The next song, Bounce, is a glitched crunch of dance haze with some horrible trash back-and-forth rhyme between N.O.R.E. and Isis about getting fucked up constantly. Vuvuvu is a glitched crunch of dance haze. Everything is a glitched crunch of dance haze. They're too attached to the sound that helped define their previous album, The Looks, and forgot about the creative exploration that happened around that sound.

Added bonus disappointment: I was breathing heavily with lust when I heard about the collaboration with E-40 for this album. Then the song, Click Click, ended up setting the two artists against each other instead of melding them. E-40 is drowned out by - you guessed it - glitched crunch dance haze. His rhymes are uninspired, so I guess it's good I can barely make them out over the time warp to 2003 he's recording in.

3. Frankmusik - Complete Me

Frankmusik put out a series of EPs and singles in 2007 that sounded like the future. A touch of glitch thrown into amateur pop that knows how to fucking pop. Amateur, here, isn't a diss at all - many of Frankmusik's earlier works feel like they have a piece of his life and mind - if not a splattered piece of his shattered falsetto vocal chords. Every beat was raw and open, which turned out to be great support for a depressing breakup up-beat pop album. He was filling the void Postal Service left in my heart, with updated bit pop sampling and a shrill lusty fervor in his voice.

Production value seems to be the problem, in the end. For example, the song 3 Little Words - one of his strongest - was originally on the Frankesium EP, released in 2007. Then the updated song got its own EP in 2008 - complete with a drastic reproduction of the title track. The new master dropped much of the grime, the crunch, the keytar experimentation. And was slightly worse. Then came the Complete Me sampler, which had a different version. The version that appears on the album is the fourth retool, adding and removing elements in a confusing mashup of artistic integrity (slowly disappearing) and production budget.

This exact trend - three or four retools that add polished layers and remove the friendly, open spirit - happened to five songs on the album. 3 Little Words, Gotta Boyfriend, Confusion Girl, Done Done and Better Off as Two. The rest of the songs are forgettable.

(Though, in the spirit of fairness, I do still love a handful of songs - In Step, Better Off as Two, and Time Will Tell - but the crappiness of the rest of the album, combined with my anticipation... bad combination. ILU, though, Frankmusik, and I will get your next album with an open mind!)

2. Kid Cudi - Man on the Moon: End of Days

Kanye West, please get away from Kid Cudi. There was a time when he could balance love, lust, life and fame. In 2008, when Cudi first found an audience with the mixtape A Kid Called Cudi, his lyrical felt fresh and new. Rappers and love are hardly a new concept, but Cudi's seamless switch from spitting hard to flawed, honest R&B vocals worked perfectly. Slick future beats successfully sampling artists like J Dilla, Paul Simon and Gnarles Barkley allowed Kid Cudi to paint a self-portrait, and he liked what he saw - a sometimes self-conscious, sometimes satisfied stoner who just wants love, fun, weed and knows he has what it takes to make that happen. By doing what he wants! "I am feeling so alone when I don't need to worry / Cuz I know the world is gonna feel this nigga."

Enter Kanye West.

Man on the Moon, what Wiki and Cudi call a "concept album," suffers from something I can't put my finger on. It's like Kanye West introduced Cudi to benzos. Cudi is still Cudi, just a few levels deeper of a stoner. Compared to previous works, Cudi sounds practically suicidal. The opening track, a kind of shoegaze spoken word piece drawled in drug vocals, sets a bizarre mood for a schizophrenic album of obvious influences and uninspired end product. The second two tracks - two of the strongest on the album - are almost out of place. Soundtrack to My Life, the second track, is a literal introduction to the album that would have fit perfectly as the first track instead of the hip-hop shoegaze dreamo scenester bullshit they ended up using.

God, long story short, Kanye West gets all up in this, 808's Cudi's mind and sends him too far to the dark side of his personality - the perfect balance that made Cudi a resonating voice of honesty tipped and he became a Brilliant Wordsmith Voice of a Generation. (We don't need one of those, Mr. West, so wake up, Mr. West, stop trying to make another. Get your shit together.)

(But really, Make Her Say is one of the best songs of the year. Common, Kanye, Cudi and a sampled Lady Gaga prove the talent is still there, just... not on the rest of the album. Make Her Say actually feels out of place on the otherwise shoegaze-hop album.)

1. Muse - The Resistance

Matthew Bellamy, singer and mastermind for Muse, was convinced his band was moving away from traditional album releases. Bellamy spent years off-and-on working on a magnum opus of sorts, a space-rock opera that became the last three tracks of the Resistance, their fifth album and the follow-up to their most successful album, Black Holes and Revelations. Speaking just for myself, I was rock hard at the idea of Bellamy releasing an album capped off by a modern epic.

Too bad most of this album ended up sounding like bad covers of other bands. Uprising sounds like Blondie and Ladytron had a child, and raised it as Muse; Muse just isn't that band, and the bass and guitar both sound cliché and dull. Even the backing crowd "chant" sounds lazy and uninvolved. Did they just find some people outside the studio to say "hey" half-heartedly as if they had just won a $20 gift card to Black Angus?

From there the album maintains a similar level of inanity. I was a little turned off by songs that sound like Guitar Hero 5 on Easy mode - little creativity, none of the shine or heart of their previous albums. This is most noticeable on Unnatural Selection, which sounds like a Muse cover band, although the chorus of the song is a strong redeeming point, a driving shit-eating grin post-apocalyptic martial law blast... and then the sedatives kick in, grinding the song to a heroin hangover halt.

All this ignores my biggest gripe - the lyrics. Bellamy just falsettos his way through an album of rallying cries for... nothing. Instead of making an album that draws allusions to any kind of real world politics, fantasy world politics, or individual or communal society, the concept seemed to be to eschew specifics for a grandiose, all-purpose rebellion story. Without a defined and interesting subject, the concept of rebellion - of uprising - is reduced to trite banality. Oh, cool. "They will not control us / we will be victorious! (Come on!)" The closest thematic element I can find is MK Ultra / Monarch mind control as a tool of oppression. The singer is full of contradictions throughout the album, like leading a rebellion while admitting "we don't know or care who's to blame / but we know that whoever holds the reigns / nothing will change, our cause has gone insane."

Okay, I'm rambling now. Muse is the bitter number one most disappointing album of 2009. Lyrically bland, musically uninspired and generally muddled.

Bonus Runners-Up: Lightning Bolt's Earthly Delights, Clark's Totem's Flare, The Mars Volta's Octahedron.