In Hindsight...Worst Top 3 Pazz and Jop Album: 00s

Look lads if you're embarrassed about being refomed corny indie fuckers just acknowledge it and move on

I'll let M.I.A. off the hook this one time and probably vote for that basically posthumous Brian Wilson thing.

Come On Feel the Illinoise

never heard this but voting for it on principle

not the question being asked, but it's crazy that Neko Case finished this high in a P&J. she's great, obviously, and a successful career musician, but she just isn't as well known as anyone else on this list. maybe TV On The Radio is close, but being from NYC, they were so familiar to so many voters in this poll.

fwiw, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood finished #8 in 2006.

I'm drunk enough to confess that the things some of you dorks consider beyond the pale are way more revealing of your character than your gently curated "good taste" so y'know, love your life for sure but also ffs check yourself

i don't think any of these are bad, besides maybe that beck album

a few "the wrong album survivedwon" options here - Fox Confessor is better than Middle Cyclone, White Blood Cells is better than Elephant, Pretty Toney over Fishscale

Hmm, I know which ones I don't care for (not many really, some bangers here), but 'held up most poorly' doesn't quite align

xxxpost #8 seems more her speed than #3, though.

obviously, this is just my perception and it doesn't matter. i just think she sticks out a little bit on this list.

For some reason I started reading the list from the bottom up and I was thinking “gee this is gonna be hard” and then I got to Sea Change and breathed a sigh of relief.

I was a pretty big Beck fan and that’s where I jumped off the bus and ran away.

Sound of Silver, and LCD Soundsystem in general, meant a lot to me at the time but I don’t think too much of them now. I had no idea how much they lifted from other bands. I don’t begrudge them that, but nowadays I’d rather listen to ESG or Liquid Liquid.

funny I was talking about LCD with someone today, I was big into them at the time (and would definitely see them again should the opportunity arise) but I can't help but think their massive success (along with Daft Punk's) is kind of an indication that pop culture is in a holding pattern, like yes it's great music but the crux of it is all "here are some cool samples from 30 year old records"

I thought pre-reformation LCD was successful at creating a sense of place, the space between young adulthood and outright middle age - looking at your record collection/influences with fond nostalgia, still wanting to party all the time but not being able to, trying to get older without getting lame.

Post-reformation, no idea what the point is (and based on what I've heard, they don't know either).

every day thousands of babies are brought into this world with zero knowledge of Remain in Light

yoshimi battles the pink robots is a pretty mediocre all around so that's the obvious one here

Illinoise is 100% the one that has aged the worst imo

illinois is still pretty good, though sufjan's done much better since

it's pretty cringey and embarrassing now, as it was at the time, but I feel like it's justified given the stuff he's done since then, watching him grapple with all these tragedies and identity crises and laying his soul bare in a way few artists are able to do, in retrospect I think this is what you'd expect a guy like that to be doing in his 20s. but there are still amazing songs on it and "Casimir Pulaski Day" still makes me emotional like nothing else, outside of stuff on the C&L album

it's a bit bloated and i get why people find his schtick on it to be too much but there's plenty of incredible songs on it - "the predatory wasp of the palisades", "casimir pulaski day", "come on! feel the illinoise!", "the tallest man, the broadest shoulders", "concerning the ufo sighting"...

age of adz, carrie & lowell, and javelin are all better but that really says more about how good those albums are

i don't hate bob dylan, or even those particular records, but i'm pretty sure they were nowhere near the best albums put out in those years

xp i was into it and idk the "cringiness" sort of felt like the point. Beats a lot of the blandness on here.

anyway yeah, Yoshimi

Yoshimi, without question

although i'm not sure it held up poorly ... it just wasn't good back then

funny I was talking about LCD with someone today, I was big into them at the time (and would definitely see them again should the opportunity arise) but I can't help but think their massive success (along with Daft Punk's) is kind of an indication that pop culture is in a holding pattern, like yes it's great music but the crux of it is all "here are some cool samples from 30 year old records"

― frogbs, Thursday, January 30, 2025 5:22 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I wanted a theme (you do not need a theme) for a party at my house and I figured I'd play that LCD concert dvd from 2011 at it and about ten minutes into listening I was thinking, oh no, I don't actually enjoy this act anymore. At least not in the concept of a goodbye final (hah hah) concert on recorded media. I feel like they hit a peak with friends during the first couple tours but as far as albums went, the bonus disc with the first one that had all the singles (Losing Your Edge, Yeah, etc) was better than the album and every successive release I cared less about. Tribulations probably my favorite album cut

I'm not even a Neko Case fan, but everything I've ever heard has been solid and she was very present between the New Pornographers and her solo work and I feel like her fanbase has never waned, and are overall on the right path

I feel like the album I care the least about is Fountains of Wayne, but they get a lot of credit as power pop songsmiths, but their big hit was about how their peer's mom is hot. Overall, power pop reminds me of an insane number of very irritating bands and I get the love for the sound but good god just shut up you overeager guitar dweebs. No one needs to be nice about that in a poll.

Haven’t heard all of these but while M.I.A. may in retrospect be the worst or at least dumbest person in this list I think it’s Yoshimi for worst album.

Tried to vote again and actually there's less here I enjoy than I first thought, and only about four or five I love, to balance the four or five I haven't heard.

my friend group really liked Yoshimi but it was one of those catch-up votes where the Flaming Lips had a best previous album they forgot to vote for

and then we enabled Wayne Coyne rolling around in an inflatable bubble for a decade over concert crowds

Im sorry but ya cant say MIA is the worst human being kn a list with Kanye.

My eyes glaze over every time I see Kanye’s name now so that was a miss you’re right

Merriweather Post Pavillion was bad when it was released, I can’t imagine that it’s gotten any better

I didn't know Phoenix were a Pazz & Jop kind of band, always associated them with '00s one word name trash like Muse and Chevelle (and AWOLNATION).

have we established that music critics in the 2000s are garbage?

One that hasn’t been mentioned that I’d be interested to hear from others on: I loved Dear Science at the time but have barely listened to it in 15 years and expect it would be pretty disappointing if I tried, especially compared to their prior output.

The Strokes

I listened to Dear Science last week, and it's great! Not the best album of 2008 (that's In Flesh Tones by Azeda Booth), but it's 11 hits in a row.

Phoenix was/is french Sofia Coppola-core, to the extent their placement in her movies gave them a huge boost. That and the fact she married the lead singer and their child is now 18 and releasing pop singles

in this poll

* LPs that I like
* LPs that I haven't listened to enough (at least recently) to form an opinion on

I'm drunk enough to confess that the things some of you dorks consider beyond the pale are way more revealing of your character than your gently curated "good taste" so y'know, love your life for sure but also ffs check yourself

Not drunk enough to name names tho NV, letting the side down there.

The Strokes were also always bad

Phoenix was AOC-core

Phoenix was basically “what if The Strokes weren’t terrible”

Phoenix was like "what if someone played the 2024 Paris Olympic Games Closing Ceremony"

what if The Strokes but.. French and kind of twee

Albums I have never not liked: both MIA, both Bob Dylan, Vampire Weekend
Albums I liked then, went through a phase of not liking, but now like again: Wilco
Albums I liked then but don't ever listen to anymore: Animal Collective, Outkast, Brian Wilson
Albums I don't really care about: the rest

To my surprise, I've heard twenty of these, four of which I would still gladly listen to in their entirety.
Of the remaining sixteen, I like at least one song from each, but Yoshimi I like the least (and I only listened to it after its 20th anniversary, so it's not from overfamiliarity).
I've only heard one song (a good one) by TV On the Radio, and, to my knowledge, not a note by Vampire Weekend or Phoenix.

I'll let M.I.A. off the hook this one time and probably vote for that basically posthumous Brian Wilson thing.

― Instead of create and send out, it pull back and consume (unperson), Thursday, January 30, 2025 10:27 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I thought Fountains of Wayne were your nemesis!

i just think she sticks out a little bit on this list.

I do remember Neko Case was getting a lot of acclaim at this time. Pazz and Jop finishers numbers 4, 5 and 6 in 2009 were Y, D and G from the infamous GAPDY acronym, so maybe she had a focussed appeal to critics who wanted more "rootsy", "authentic" alternative to some of that stuff?

welcome interstate managers is an all time great for me

lcd soundsystem, vampire weekend, anco, sufjan stevens

I thought Fountains of Wayne were your nemesis!

Nah. Fountains of Wayne aren't worth having an opinion about. (See also: Vampire Weekend, Sufjan Stevens, Neko Case, Phoenix. The musical equivalent of packing peanuts, all of them.)

Without having listened to it for 20 years I suspected Van Lear Rose was a better album than the country train jumpers who'd never owned her stuff thought at the time -- and it is! I re-listened last year and it sounded good.

Fox Confessor is absolutely her high water mark in my estimation, in no small part because of the band she assembled with The Sadies, Garth Hudson, Howe Gelb, Calexico, and Kelly Hogan. Her storytelling has never been more vivid or concise, and I remember disagreeing strongly with complaints at the time that a few of the songs felt chopped off or underdeveloped; to me, it's an album I almost always play 2x back-to-back, and I love that about it.

I agree, too, that Van Lear Rose holds up. I can't think of a Jack White project that I like more.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Gotta be Beck. I'm pretty meh on a lot of these, but that one ... I mean, I even liked Mutations! But ugh.

Ignoring people whose politics have since made them pariahs (Kanye, MIA) I went with Vampire Weekend because they suck and have always sucked.

never will understand the strokes hype, so that.

Sea Change, weak album and one of the last Beck albums that anyone paid attention to.

It is shocking just how much music writers cared about indie rock at the time. Was it the Pitchfork influence? I still like most of those albums.

I have never heard the fountains of wayne and neko case albums.

00s indie rock is like the scab we can't stop picking. leave it alone and it will heal.

Merriweather Post Pavilion. I remember hearing them do the material live a year or so before it came out and as I was full of booze, caffeine and good vibes loving it. The idea of Beach Boys x African choral music x techno aligned with my tastes at the time, but I find it pretty unlistenable now. The pseudo African stuff sounds quite dubious now while the maxed out production/mix is overbearing. I remember a snarky comment someone made about it basically being a hipster version of Sunchyme by Dario G, only not as catchy, and that has a lot of truth to it.

omg Sunchyme, what a great comparison (fwiw I love both)

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

none of the top four do it for me so i can't really fault how this turned out

ok I did relisten to Illinois just to see how it's held up and what struck me right away is that this really couldn't happen today, we're way too jaded in this country to make something like this a hit, in fact the entire theme of the album could only come across as incredibly sarcastic or at best some Gal Gadot shit

Did the jadedness happen before or after Hamilton?

it was always a deeply ridiculous concept and he long-ago admitted that the 50 states project was largely just a promotional gimmick - there was always some level of cynicism behind it. idk that it would come across as the way you describe in the current day though, thematically it doesn't actually have that much to do with the state of illinois. the concept is mostly just a gimmick where he uses various historical references as a way to explore whatever he actually wants to write about, and the connection is often pretty tenuous. it can be a bit of a lyrical crutch at times, like the verse in "come on! feel the illinoise!" where he just lists inventions debuted at the world fair, or "jacksonville" which largely is just listing off references and is no one's favourite track.

carrie & lowell was actually derived from recordings made for an intended oregon album, but he was convinced to change the concept by friends who were helping him sort through the material - one of them said that the state concept was "complicated misdirection and an architecture by which he could actually write about himself" which is otm

It worked with the Michigan album, but yeah, I always thought something was off about Illinois. Especially because the first song has a ghost asking him 'Are you writing from your heart?', and the answer clearly seems to be no? That was always really weird.

i mean, he is and he isn't. there's a number of moving personal narratives with minor-at-best connections to illinois, which are generally the favourites, and then there's "they are night zombies!" where he's spelling out the names of ghost towns

Sea Change harshly done by here imo. Yeah there's some schlock on it but about half of it is really good still imo

Are there any amerucan bands on this?
Them

will never understand the sea change hate.

yeah I get the state thing was mostly a lark but there was also something kind of charming about it, like if nothing else he'd researched some history along the way and presents it in a way that feels kind of celebratory

would’ve voted sound of silver. amazing singles (well, i love “someone great,” my appreciation of “all my friends” did not survive living in nyc during the early ‘10s), pretty meager as an album, has probably the worst closing track of all time

Couple of nice songs on Sea Change, but it's largely a snooze. The arrangements - which themselves directly reference Serge Gainsbourg, Robert Kirby et al - do a lot of heavy lifting. Midnite Vultures took the 90s hipster irony as far as it could go, so he needed to move on, but navel gazing break-up songs weren't it. Rich famous guy moping about his love life? It's all a bit James Taylor. As a singer-songwriter, he just doesn't come close what indie contemporaries like Will Oldham, Elliot Smith, Smog, Cat Power et al were doing at the time. I really loved Mutations at the time, but Sea Change kind of exposed the limits of his talents.

whats nice about the vinyl is you can just ignore Side D

this really couldn't happen today, we're way too jaded in this country

no this was a lot of the talk surrounding Michigan and Illinoise

and Seven Swans pretty much. the new sincerity. or whatever. now, when there's not so much of a kinda mainstream of indie as much (if u know what i mean), feels pretty moot

I think if Beck bounced back and put out some great stuff after Sea Change, it wouldn't be seen as a stinker. But for me it's the line where he got boring and the following slump tainted some of his classic albums.

He was a favorite of mine but nowadays it's all Mellow Gold and One Foot In The Grave. Sea Change isn't just a dud, it's a reminder that an artist that I was fully committed to wasn't really all that. Yoshimi sorta does this, but I would argue At War With The Mystics is the Lips Sea Change.

Of all these albums, I still love The Strokes, MIA, VW, Portishead, Outkast, Loretta and Neko the mostest. POO would be The Strokes without second thought

Never understood TV On The Radio, but my exposure to that band is so limited. I was in the record store in 2003 with my best friend and he put on "Staring At The Sun" and immediately we exclaimed "this is the best thing ever" but by the end of the song we said "false alarm! let's never listen to this again!" in a very early-20s rush-to-judge kinda way. I don't think I've made it through one of their songs let alone an album entire

Yeah, Beck was a huge deal for me in my teens, helping to open up whole worlds of music and giving me an exit from the Britpop hegemony. But he just got a bit boring from Sea Change onwards. I heard you re the Flips. Yoshimi I loved at the time and it was my intro to the Boredoms, so fair play to them, but At War was a big drop off. Embryonic was a partial return to form, but it didn't really transcend its very obvious reference points/quotations. Then they got into all the stupid gimmicks and covers albums, followed by Coyne's coked up midlife crisis, dickhead behaviour to Kliph, Erykah Badu etc. I wrote a very overwrought "what is this shit" review of Heady Fwends for The Quietus. I cringe at some of the overwriting and lofty denunciations, but I did feel a bit betrayed by what they'd become.

The Terror is the best thing they did post Soft Bulletin, and there’s loads of good songs and releases, but it was such a glut of stuff. They are a band that worked better under limitations. The Soft Bulletin concerts, which were small and seemingly held together with duct tape, were so much stronger than the bigger, slicker shows later.

the worst thing that happened to so many of these acts that started out underground was becoming part of the ongoing movement which turned so many musicians, many of whom had previously been genuine oddballs or experimental artists, into the new classic rock. so many of them got deadly boring.

and then we enabled Wayne Coyne rolling around in an inflatable bubble for a decade over concert crowds

― ɥɯ ︵ (°□°) (mh), Thursday, January 30, 2025 8:31 PM (two weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

looks like I already said it!

i agree w/mh, hi there, on LCD, because i loved that first album a lot and then everything after was rapidly diminishing returns and they played themselves because reading up on their influences led me down rabbitholes where i found much more interesting music and just never listened to them again. agree w/frogbs about Daft Punk too but that's another story.

I voted Sea Change. I just can't take Beck as seriously as that album screams for me to take him. The goofier and sloppier he is, the better

Obviously don't think Is This It turned out to be the second coming of VU/Feelies/Television/Ramones or whatever other bands were referenced at the time, but still adore that album and play it regularly, especially in the car. It is packed with grooves -- Valensi/Hammond Jr. and the bassist make it seem so easy. Impossible for me to sit still listening to "Hard to Explain." The rest of the top, I'm not terribly surprised by. Kind of surprised 4 people voted for MIA and 1 for Portishead.

strokes
radiohead
bjork
pj harvey
stankonia

one of these

i have very strong negative feelings towards a lot of these albums lol. former record store employee trauma.

I was really into Beck in my teens but when Sea Change came out I just thought it was boring. I assumed it was me not sitting down and giving it a chance or meeting it where it was because the reviews were so overwhelming positive. Glad to know it wasn't just me.

I voted Animal Collective because I've always really disliked them, except for the "ooowwwwwwww"s on "My Girls".

oh wait we’re voting worst not best… impossible

I was Beck-obsessed as a teen and started wearing thrift-store guayaberas. Got off the train with Mutations; by Sea Change I didn't recognise him any more, but I do think the production is gorgeous and Beck's Dad does some career-best string writing on it.

My flaming dislike for The Flaming Lips is too-often typed out on this board, but I will always admit that although I have listened-to and despise (almost) everything they've ever recorded, and Yoshimi is certainly my poll-pick for 'the worst], that said, Embryonic is terrific and I did listen to the entirety of I Found A Star On The Ground and found it mostly breathtaking

what upset me the most about Wayne is that album he did with Miley Cyrus, I think that would've been a really cool idea in the hands of basically anyone else

brimstead otm. there's so much trashon here i hate that i don't remember what i voted for.

despite that, i must admit some slight disappointment at my inability to vote for the arcade fire here.

Yeah like, Lonesome Tears is, I'd say, one of the best songs on any of the albums mentioned here. Yeah it's all about the arrangement, but why discount that?

yeah I get the state thing was mostly a lark but there was also something kind of charming about it, like if nothing else he'd researched some history along the way and presents it in a way that feels kind of celebratory

but i don't think it is really celebratory overall?

would dig sea change (instrumentals)

also one of the best-sounding things nigel godrich did.

and a final personal note:
i was 13 when "loser" was peaking. i thought it was cool that the self-proclaimed loser did possibly the most loser-ish thing and made a super serious soft rock breakup album when he got his heart broken.

The arrangements - which themselves directly reference Serge Gainsbourg, Robert Kirby et al - do a lot of heavy lifting. Midnite Vultures took the 90s hipster irony as far as it could go, so he needed to move on, but navel gazing break-up songs weren't it.

It didn't strike me as trying for a new direction so much as settling into a formula: the quirky party album (Odelay, Midnight Vultures) gets followed by the downbeat mellow album (Mutations, Sea Change). Sea Change def the worst of that lot tho.

I did listen to the entirety of I Found A Star On The Ground and found it mostly breathtaking

ok now i'm really curious about that because i would really never have expected that to be any good at all for obvious reasons

x-post you're right about the musical pattern, which roughly continues with Guero (let's get the Dust Brothers back!) and The Information (back to Nigel Godrich) and so on. I mean new direction in terms of shedding the 90s irony, although I guess he never entirely succeeded in that, so that on albums like The Information, say, you end up with this unsatisfying mix of quirky post-modern collage and dour delivery.