By Jason Grishkoff | August 2nd, 2012
I’m sure we’ve all shared this experience: you find an absolutely amazing album, whether it be through a friend, on a blog, or by another means. Then you start to listen to it. And you listen, and listen, and keep on listening.
Eventually, like it or not, you listen to the album so many times that it starts to lose your attention. And it’s often then and there that you wish you could hear something new from the artist. You wonder, “When the hell will their next album come out?”
Flash forward two years to when they release that album. Imagine your disappointment when it sucks. As far a music goes, nothing tends to get me down more than that.
In the following list, I will share with you five bands that released absolutely terrible follow-ups. I will post a song from one of the artist’s good album(s). Then I will point out the artist’s failure to live up to expectations set by their debut.
No doubt, some of my choices may be controversial. But it’s just, like, my opinion, man.
This one's going to get me in trouble, so let's start where we all agree: Funeral was a bloody amazing album. It opened up new musical worlds, enrapturing listeners from start to finish.
Upon release in 2004, the album blew up both critically and commercially. And when they bought a run-down Church in Montreal to begin recording their second album, music geeks world-wide marked their calendars in anticipation.
Enter Neon Bible. The first time I listened to it, I hated every single second. In fact, I probably turned it off (I don't quite remember).
For me, the worst part was that half the songs were out-of-tune. Couple that with overpowering reverb and generally lackluster songs, and there was basically no way it could live up to the band's debut.
I tried to listen to the album a good ten more times, both alone and with other Arcade Fire fans. Unfortunately I just couldn't get into it: I felt they'd lost their edge, and I was closer to annoyed than entertained. Pretty disappointing, indeed.
Fortunately, they put the past behind them destroyed things with The Suburbs.
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Benjamin Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden absolutely knocked it out of the park with their debut album Oracular Spectacular. Topping charts worldwide, it was named best album of 2008 by NME and included in 3 of the top 20 tracks selected as Triple J's Hottest 100. To boot, the Justice remix of their song "Electric Feel" won a Grammy.
All that hype led to a lot of hype. Too much hype, it seems. By the time Oracular Spectacular rolled around, fan expectations were through the roof. And frankly, there's only one way to go from there: straight down.
Congratulations received mostly positive reviews upon release, but let's be honest: it was pretentious and lacked all the awesomeness of their debut album.
Clearly, the band wasn't happy about their new found fame (as evidenced by their shunning of old songs at live performances), and were determined to make a name for themselves as artists. Instead, they wound up with drawn out songs like "Siberian Breaks."
Rumor has it the band is recording a third, self-titled album. We're keeping our fingers crossed for an Arcade Fire moment.
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When you have to explain that your first track intentionally sounds bad for artistic purposes, you're going to have a hard time pleasing the fans.
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah burst onto the scene with their self-titled debut album received strong recommendations from Pitchfork and other blogs. I found myself listening to the album day in and day out -- there was something undeniably fun about the band's off-kilter sound.
Two years later, they followed things up with Some Loud Thunder. Clearly, the album failed to lift them to similar heights as the last one did. Prefix Magazine's explanation for the uninspiring sophomore release was that "Ounsworth's impassioned delivery [was] gone throughout most [the album], replaced by what can only be described as vague indifference."
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Their first full album De-Loused in the Comatorium was a phenomenal work of art: a unified web of speculative fiction telling the first-person story of someone in a drug-induced coma, battling the evil side of his mind.
Like Cursive's The Ugly Organ, I think it was the unique conceptual approach to this album that pulls me. When I listen to all 10 tracks in a row, I am at high risk of becoming completely and thoroughly absorbed.
The problem with their near-perfect conceptual debut was that they needed to somehow follow it up with a work of equal prowess. Unfortunately, Frances the Mute didn't quite hit the right notes.
While I find Pitchfork's assessment of the album ("a homogeneous shitheap of stream-of-consciousness turgidity") to be a little harsh, they were strikingly predictive of the work to come. Things just kept getting more redundant and drawn out with each subsequent release.
In short, jam bands bore me.
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