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The 10 Worst Albums of 2015

From new age to rap to pop, we’ve assembled a list of 10 albums we hope you won’t find under the tree next week.

The 10 Worst Albums of 2015

Last week we offered up 25 reasons why the album, as a creative force, is alive and kicking. From pop (Grimes’s Art Angels) to rock (Courtney Barnett’s Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit) to R&B (Miguel’s Wildheart) and hip-hop (Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly), 2015 saw no shortage of artists shaping—or reshaping—the format to make statements about love, sex, depression, and institutionalized racism. But there was also no dearth of new and established acts churning out indulgent, grating, and otherwise ill-conceived albums. From paint-by-numbers new age to crass rap to retro-obsessed pop, we’ve assembled a list of 10 albums we hope you won’t find under the tree next week.


The 10 Worst Albums of 2015

10. Enya, Dark Sky Island

Even by the standards of “Orinoco Flow” or “Caribbean Blue,” Enya’s Dark Sky Island is turgid and portentous and empty, setting platitudes like “Only time keeps us apart” and “There is wisdom waiting to be found” to the same handful of sonic backdrops she’s been recycling every five years or so. It’s been 10 since Amarantine, with only a stop-gap Christmas album in between, and the absence has seemed to make critics feel kind, earning Dark Sky Island Enya’s best reviews since 1995’s supposed classic The Memory Tree. Unless you’re afflicted by the same nostalgia, though, it’s hard to imagine being enamored with, say, that plucking violin sound from 2000’s “Only Time” being given an almost note-perfect recreation 15 years later (on “Echoes in Rain”) or the new-age-y made-up language of the title track. In other words, Enya’s latest will appeal to fans of other Enya albums and no one else. Sam Mac


The 10 Worst Albums of 2015

9. The Dead Weather, Dodge and Burn

Jack White’s umpteenth side project, the Dead Weather, has always been a repository for his most unimaginative and grating musical tendencies, but with Dodge and Burn, the band has taken their riffless brand of sludge rock to a new level of rifflessness and sludginess. Led by Kills frontwoman Alison Mosshart, Dodge and Burn sees the perpetually leather jacket-clad band once again attempting to imprint their laughably contrived brooding badasses image onto record via cement-mixer distortion and cringe-worthy “tough” lyrics like “And if you stand in my way/I’m gonna bully bully bully/Bully till I’m free.” It’s telling that the best song on this tuneless album, “Three Dollar Hat,” features White straight-up rapping. The song’s most redeeming quality? It doesn’t sound anything like the Dead Weather. Jeremy Winograd


The 10 Worst Albums of 2015

8. Tyler, the Creator, Cherry Bomb

Cherry Bomb tries to get back to a sound Tyler, the Creator clearly isn’t feeling anymore, having already abandoned the uncompromising anger of Goblin for the blissed-out, toked-up vibes of 2013’s Wolf. Mainly the rapper just seems to be out of ideas, compensating for a lack of engaging lyrics or melodies with sheer punishing volume in a way not even the abrasive sonics of Goblin ever quite succumbed to. And when that isn’t working, he reverts to the more chilled grooves of Wolf, in the process proving himself to be rap’s least convincing loverman. Sample lyric: “FaceTime your clit/I will jack off my dick.” Mac


The 10 Worst Albums of 2015

7. Ringo Starr, Postcards from Paradise

When considering the prospect of acquiring a Ringo Starr solo album, one must always keep in mind that the Funny One’s peak as a songwriter was “Octopus’s Garden.” Forty-five years later, he may very well have hit his nadir with the title track from Postcards from Paradise, composed of three basic chords and lyrics consisting of a succession of Beatles song titles (sample lyric: “I know you told me yesterday/You’ve got to hide your love away”). The rest of the album isn’t much better, and certainly isn’t enhanced by Ringo’s obviously Auto-Tuned vocals, which sit damningly at the center of the mix among a bunch of soulless guitar twiddling and cheap-sounding synths. Winograd

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The 10 Worst Albums of 2015

6. Neil Young and the Promise of the Real, The Monsanto Years

Counting his efforts with Buffalo Springfield and various iterations of Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young, The Monsanto Years is Neil Young’s 46th studio album, and even with that kind of prolificacy under his belt, it’s easily one of his worst efforts to date. The lyrics are so ham-fistedly overt in their politics (“In the streets of the Capitol, corporations are taking control/Democracy crushed at their feet”) that they make Young’s previous protest songs, like “Ohio,” sound like “I Am the Walrus” by comparison. Almost every one of the album’s nine tracks are big agribusiness screeds so grating and unsubtle that one could easily get better (and more lyrical) insight on the issue from a half-decent YouTube vlogger. Winograd


The 10 Worst Albums of 2015

5. Gang of Four, What Happens Next

What happens next when you leave Andy Gill alone with the Gang of Four brand? He hires some journeyman to sing about Facebook while layering on the guitars like he’s Trent Reznor and it’s 1995. There’s nothing remotely resembling dance-rock’s putative forefathers amid the turgid mess that is What Happens Next. In place of wiry polygons and stop-start sprints are distended right angles and a plodding clip. But perhaps Gill is simply fulfilling the band’s destiny: the original Gang of Four may have begun as leaders of a revolution, but eventually, they were tried as reactionaries. Benjamin Aspray


The 10 Worst Albums of 2015

4. CeeLo Green, Heart Blanche

Say what you will about Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz, but at least pop’s premier problem child’s collaboration with the Flaming Lips seemed decently sincere in its vapid ambition. CeeLo Green’s Heart Blanche is two-thirds the length of Miley’s lark, but far more vulgar an indulgence. The singer’s fifth solo outing is as flatulent as a deflating balloon, though occasionally the warmed-over R&B tedium breaks for some deep awfulness, like “Tonight,” which sounds like Journey’s “Separate Ways” as arranged by Andrew Lloyd Weber and sung by Chaka Khan, and “Robin Williams,” a soporific tribute to dead funnymen. Green showed more innovation earlier this year redefining “rape” on Twitter. Spending so much to sound this bored is conspicuous consumption in its very essence. Aspray


The 10 Worst Albums of 2015

3. Diana Krall, Wallflower

Diana Krall’s T. Bone Burnett-produced 2012 album Glad Rag Doll seemed to signify that she’d finally figured out a way to make her retro-accented vocal jazz and pop palatable to more than just the coffee-house set or comatose Grammy voters. Her raspy croon found new, expressive grit, cutting through Mark Ribot’s jagged guitar leads and Burnett’s crackling production, which made the old-timey genre fetishism she was working in seem vital and present. It was a thrilling curveball of an album for an artist who had totally stagnated. Unfortunately, Krall followed it by reverting to her schlockiest possible setting. Produced by David Foster, Wallflower is the most dead-tired covers album of the year, draining the good (“Don’t Dream It’s Over”), the bad (“Desperado”), and the really bad (“If I Take You Home Tonight,” an unreleased outtake from Macca’s snoozer Kisses on the Bottom) of even the faintest hint of whatever personality they may have once possessed, and reducing them to arrangements of stately piano, tasteful acoustic bass, and prosaic strings. The pop songs fare worst, as when Krall’s commitment to sustained drowsiness leads to losing the tempo change in the chorus of the Carpenters’ “Superstar,” or the by-the-numbers bossa-nova beat that kicks up halfway through her ponderous “California Dreamin’.” But really only Randy Newman’s “Feels Like Home” seems to stand up to this particularly rigid classicism, because it was already in that vein to begin with—and by then we’re 40 minutes in and everyone’s asleep. Mac

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The 10 Worst Albums of 2015

2. Passion Pit, Kindred

Kindred pares down Passion Pit’s sound to the blandest possible ingredients: starchy synth lines and four-on-the-floor bass drum buttressing Michael Angelakos’s vocals—multi-tracked and in an ear-offending falsetto that often sounds at least an octave outside his range. Passion Pit’s founding member has been vaunted to semi-star status in the last few years by a hype machine that’s spun the tabloid fodder of his personal life—diagnosed bipolar disorder, suicidal tendencies, and most recently a divorce followed by Angelakos coming out as gay—into a disingenuous selling point for his music. But the cheerful indie pop of Kindred doesn’t grapple with any of these things so much as it tries to pass off an avoidance of them as somehow subversive. Mac


The 10 Worst Albums of 2015

1. Meghan Trainor, Title

Even Rick Santorum’s daughters need body positivity, if Meghan Trainor’s brand logic is to be believed. Trainor can sing, and she can write a pretty contagious hook too. But there’s something deeply cynical about whitewashing big-booty self-love to serve consumers too chaste for Nicki Minaj, as the Nantucket native did on the mercilessly ubiquitous “All About That Bass.” That song is padded out by another half hour of cloying nü-wop on her debut, Title. A lyric from the album’s third single, “Dear Future Husband,” imploring said husband to let her win every fight in exchange for sex, tells you everything you need to know about Trainor’s notion of empowerment. Aspray

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