The Beach Boys - Summer in Paradise

Low-hanging fruit here. Less a true Beach Boys album than a Mike Love vanity project. Listening to this uncomfortable clusterfuck feels like getting repeatedly hit on at a motel pool by a hairy, middle aged divorcé in a Hawaiian shirt. It’s uncanny, soul-crushing stuff, and sounds more like a parody of midlife crisis yacht rock than actual music intended to be enjoyed. The centerpiece of it all is “Summer of Love,” a song that would be an unexplainable phenomenon if not for the fact that Mike Love really is that guy: he raps (I use that word loosely) creepy, unacceptable shit like “Yeah I'll take you to the movies but I'm no fool, first I'll get you on the beach or in a swimming pool / Doing unto others is the Golden Rule, but doing it with you would be so very cool.” This ruinous endeavor is a complete bastardization of the “cars, girls, and surf” pop sound that the group sought to capitalize on in the early stages of their career. Crazy how this is in the same discography as Pet Sounds.

Weezer - The Red Album

Everyone knocks Raditude as the worst Weezer album, but at least that one was coherent. The approach with The Red Album was very clearly “let’s throw all our shit at the wall and if it doesn’t stick, scrape it up off the floor, throw it again, and use it anyway.” It’s admirable, though, that the other members of the group were given opportunities to show off their songwriting chops - unfortunately, the results are so awkward and messy they leave you wishing they stuck to their roles. Listen to drummer Pat Wilson’s contribution, “Automatic,” and tell me he doesn’t sing like he has a gun pointed at his head. It’s painful. You’ve at least got to give this album credit for containing the best lyric Rivers Cuomo ever wrote: “When I was younger, I used to go and tip cows for fun, yeah / Actually I didn’t do that, ‘cause I didn’t want the cow to be sad.”

Arctic Monkeys - Suck It and See

Released between their best album, Humbug, and their commercial breakthrough, AM, this album strives hard for this vintage 70’s psychedelic fuzz-rock aesthetic and never sounds like anything more than exactly that: striving to be something it’s not. The memorable riffs and basslines of "Whatever People Say I Am," "That's What I'm Not," and "Favourite Worst Nightmare" were swapped for some of the blandest, most forgettable butt-rock retreads ever put on record. Alex Turner, who, on past albums proved himself to be a gifted lyricist, opts for intentionally opaque bullshit that provokes cringes and secondhand embarrassment. “Library pictures of the quickening canoe, the first of its kind to get to the moon / Give me an eeny, meeny, miny, moe, or an ip, dip, dog shit rock and roll.”

Reel Big Fish - Candy Coated Fury

Their shtick, the whole “we’re cynical and bitter and jaded and we drink a lot and we’re only in this for the money and we hate our fans and fuck you” thing they do, got old over ten years ago. Here it’s exaggerated times ten, shoved in the listener’s face, and as a result the cynicism comes off as even less jokey and more honest. Everything is phoned in, the arrangements are lifeless. It’s not funny anymore.

Animal Collective - Sung Tongs

No argument will ever convince me that this album is anything but pretentious wank. If you’ve ever wanted the experience of living in the woods and eating nothing but wet leaves and slowly forgetting how to speak English, listen to Sung Tongs.