this is the fifth and final installment in my countdown of my top 5 biggest letdown albums

1. R.E.M. - “Up”

On these past four entries, when I’ve said “I was a huge so-and-so fan,” I’ve meant it, but it all pales in comparison to how huge of an R.E.M. fan I was.

Quick rundown: One of the highlights of getting dial-up internet in my hometown was that I was able to visit the alt.music.rem newsgroup.

Once, while in the midst of a 90-minute drive with this girl I liked, I was eagerly playing her new R.E.M. songs from a live bootleg of the Monster tour. She finally said “I think you’re going to have to accept that I’m not as in to R.E.M. as you.”

While on a trip to South Carolina for my cousin’s graduation, I made my parents take us on a detour through Athens, Georgia, where I assumed the gas stations would be full of “Home of R.E.M.” postcards.

To me, R.E.M. was this symbol of how it was okay to just like what you wanted to like. I didn’t really become aware of them until 1989, when “Stand” came out. I remember standing in the classroom before recess, talking with some classmates, asking them if they like this neat new R.E.M. band. I was immediately met with scorn, being informed that I couldn’t like R.E.M. - I had to like Poison and Motley Crue. I thought to myself “That’s not cool,” and later that summer I discovered The Cure and Elvis Costello and a beautiful future was beginning to unfold.

The peak of my fandom was definitely in the Monster days. I actually wasn’t that huge of a fan of that album at first, but I just couldn’t stop listening to the old stuff, collecting live bootlegs and assembling compilations of b-sides and fan club singles. That period was also the first (and only) time I saw them live.
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this is the fourth installment in my countdown of my top 5 biggest letdown albums

2. Grant Lee Buffalo - “Copperopolis”

These explanations are starting to get pretty formulaic and predictable. I loved a band, loved their music, loved their albums, new album came out, I hated it.

So with each successive review revealing more of the pattern, it’s harder then to get across that the music of these bands meant progressively more to me as the criticisms become more familiar. I’ve never heard anything like the first two Grant Lee Buffalo albums. The words that come to mind when asked to describe the sound would be some kind of Old Testament, deep-south, haunting, gothic folk rock. There’s just this aspect to the music that makes it feel like it’s coming from some far-off, mythical place and it’s been trapped in some kind of curse-guarded cave for a few millennia. You see the three guys in the sleeve who supposedly made it and it’s just hard to believe that something so huge and almost inhuman - in an immortal way - comes from these folks.

When Copperopolis came out in the summer of 1996, I made a special trip to Lincoln in my new car just to buy it. The album to me is best explained by saying that it sounds like a band borrowed all of Grant Lee Buffalo’s instruments and production techniques but forgot to channel whatever spirit that normally flows through the songs. I don’t normally speak this stupidly about music, what with all this other-wordly junk, but there really was this intangible creepiness to the first two albums that was like you were being haunted by them rather than listening to them. That’s completely gone from Copperopolis. Completely.

After that, bassist and producer Paul Kimble - whose contribution to the band’s sound cannot be understated - left the group, and their fourth and final album, Jubilee, was so far removed from their early brilliance it’s like it was another band. This album was such a disappointment to me, and so drastically affected my following of the band, that it was at first going to be #1 on this list. But after a little bit of thinking, I realized that spot could really only go to one album.

this is the third installment in my countdown of my top 5 biggest letdown albums

3. Matthew Sweet - “Blue Sky on Mars”

Matthew Sweet is like this icon of “alternative” music for me. In the early 90s, when KKNB-FM switched from B-104’s pop music format to “The Planet,” I discovered this radio station that played all this great 80s music I’d liked from my childhood - Tears for Fears, Duran Duran, Talking Heads - and this strange new music that I had never heard before. I later learned that this format was called “alternative” music.

I identify Matthew Sweet with the Planet so much because every time he came back to his hometown of Lincoln, they would promote it like crazy. They also pushed Altered Beast like mad, and Time Capsule ended up becoming one of my absolute favorite songs of all time.

I would listen to Girlfriend and Altered Beast all the time, undoubtedly making my friends sick of Matthew Sweet in the process. When he came to the Pershing in the summer of 1995, I was so excited to go to that show even though he was opening for Soul Asylum. There was a meet and greet at Gateway Mall before the show, and I got him to autograph my copy of Girlfriend. I was just the biggest geeked-out fan.

That probably peaked when I waited on the phone to speak with him on Modern Rock Live. I remember asking him what his touring plans were because it was the best question I could come up with. I think my motivation was that if you got on the air, you got a free autographed copy of 100% Fun. So even though I was eagerly anticipating that album, I waited until I could get my defaced version.

It was just so cool being able to see the video for Sick of Myself on MTV. I felt a tiny bit of ownership in his success, having been a loyal fan for several years and spreading the good word at every opportunity. There was this sense of calm, like “Finally, we of the assembled Matthew Sweet fans, can relax now that he has broken through into the mainstream. It’s all super rock stardom from here on out.”

I remember walking out of Best Buy with my copy of Blue Sky on Mars. By this point, The Planet had switched to adult contemporary music and the only quasi-alternative radio outlet was the jock rock station The Edge. Thankfully, even they gave a little play to lead-off single Where You Get Love. It was pretty catchy so I was really excited for the new album.

One of the things I really loved about Matthew Sweet’s sound was actually something that turned me off at first, and that was the rather strange guitar solos from musical partners Lloyd and Quine. There was none of that on Blue Sky, and I later learned that Sweet had ditched the two so he could solo by himself. It was a bad call. I couldn’t stand the album and had to face the realization that Sweet had done himself in.

It was a little easier at that point to admit to myself that I really hadn’t liked 100% Fun all that much either. His music had peaked with Altered Beast for me, but I just so badly wanted him to be this huge breakthrough pop star that I was willing to deceive myself. Supposedly he’s put out some decent stuff since then, but that album just killed the joy for me and comes in at #3.

this is the second installment of my countdown of my top 5 biggest letdown albums

4. Super Furry Animals - “Rings Around the World”

I remember picking up Fuzzy Logic, the first Super Furry Animals album released in America, and falling instantly in love with the noisy, melodic, crazy, distorted, abstracted, beautiful pop music. It was an album that you could listen to and feel like you knew just how much fun the band was having as they created it. Radiator, while slightly darker, maintained that exciting sense of sonic freedom and only improved on the debut.

I remember reading the NME’s list of the best nu-psychedelic albums and seeing Radiator receive such glowing praise. I felt like I must have accidentally really tapped into something special. The Ice Hockey Hair EP was probably my favorite release of 1998, and I ordered that rubber-packaged b-sides collection from the UK because I just had to have it all and I couldn’t stop listening to it and loving it. It even rubbed off on my sister, who picked up the US release of Radiator when it came out here in 1999 (packaged with the b-sides collection as a bonus disc).

Much like the situation I told of with Suede yesterday, I was a music director at KRNU when Guerilla was scheduled to come out in the summer of 1999. I’d pre-ordered my copy from the UK because it was supposed to come out a month or so earlier there and I didn’t want to wait. It took me a little longer to get into Guerilla than it had taken with the previous albums, but once it grew on me, it was right up there with the rest.

I just really admired the band and how passionate and energetic they were about their creations. I remember reading an interview with Gruff Rhys, where he said something along the lines of “I’d much rather have a one-track studio and a 48-track mind than a 48-track studio and a one-track mind.” As a wannabe-rockstar in those days, I was very inspired by those words - doing my best to get some good out of my two-track Tascam portastudio.

Even though their 2000 album Mwng was all in Welsh, I still had the same amount of anticipation and satisfaction. It wasn’t until 2002 that they lost me.

I’m not sure what it was about Rings Around the World, because like any good album that you don’t like, I don’t remember much about it anymore. The lingering sense that I still have, though, was that the excitement and energy felt forced. Falsetto singalongs and noisy whines felt like superficial masks for deeper faults rather than another guest at the musical party.

The album annoyed me, but I should have been careful what I wished for, because it was the last time they demonstrated that frenzied songwriting - contrived or not. Subsequent albums have been downers. They’ve had nice songs - I did even go out and buy Phantom Power - but they just don’t feel as special and unique as early SFA material. There’s still some beauty, but the fun is gone.

this is the first installment in my countdown of my top 5 biggest letdown albums

5. Suede - “Head Music”

I didn’t much care for Suede until Dog Man Star came out, at which point I was able to go back and get into their self-titled debut, which I couldn’t much get into at first. To this day, I still think those two albums are amazing, DMS especially, and I love the way Bernard Butler’s guitar sounded back then.

I was disappointed to learn when he left the band, but even though Coming Up was a notable progression in their sound, I still found it to be satisfying and worth waiting for. I remember that a friend had made me a mix tape with “The Beautiful Ones” on it, and I refused to listen to that side of the tape because the album hadn’t come out yet and I didn’t want anything ruined for me.

The band’s style had gotten significantly brighter, and it worked thanks to some high-quality pop songs on the album. Songs like By the Sea even helped bridge what would have been a more notable gap from the Dog Man Star days.

When Sci-Fi Lullabies came out, I was living in England and paid the ridiculous 30-pound price tag for the double album and loved most of it. Any b-sides collection is going to have some stinkers, but Suede was one of those bands that wasn’t afraid to put a fantastic song on the b-side.

All of this leads up to May of 1999. I was a music director at KRNU by that point, and I was very excited that a new Suede album was coming out. KRNU hadn’t had any Suede in the library for years, and I was in a position to change that. I’d ordered the advance single of Electricity from the UK and played it on my show quite a bit, but it seemed almost like going through the motions. The NME had run some parodies of Brett Anderson’s lyrics, and I felt like I was listening to some of those put to music. I still held out hope that the album was going to be great, though.

I added the album, attempting to convince myself as much as the listeners that it was worth paying attention to. I eventually gave up, and thankfully after I left, someone pulled the album. I was just scanning through the songs on the album, and now eight years later, all I really remember about it was the awful title track with its refrain of “Give me head / give me head / give me head music instead.”

I don’t even know what happened to my copy of the album. I remember that I gave away my copy of the Electricity single. I was just surprised to discover that Suede had released another album in 2002 entitled A New Morning. Head Music rubbed me so wrong that I just stopped caring about what they were up to and remained content with what they’d done.

Today begins my countdown of my personal Top 5 Biggest Letdown Albums of All Time. I was thinking about this while some friends and I were discussing who we would consider the greatest rock band of this decade, and it made me realize how many bands I used to really love put out really disappointing albums. So over the next five days, I’ll share my own personal top 5 losers with the hopes that it will start some discussion in these quite-dormant comments.

I’ve used several criteria to weigh what makes an album a big letdown:

1. Being highly anticipated. I need to have really looked forward to its release, rather than just having stumbled upon it or finding it in the back catalog of an established band I was just getting into.

2. Having almost no memorable artistically redeeming qualities.

3. Killed off my interest in the artist / band, making me think of them in terms of their past as opposed to something with a present and a future.

So be here tomorrow for #5, and maybe if you have your own, post them on your blog and I can link to it. Or if you don’t have your own blog, e-mail yours to me and I’ll post yours.

UPDATE: Since the countdown on this blog has now continued, here’s the list:

5. Suede - “Head Music”
4. Super Furry Animals - “Rings Around the World”
3. Matthew Sweet - “Blue Sky on Mars”
2. Grant Lee Buffalo - “Copperopolis”
1. R.E.M. - “Up”

I think it’s worth noting that this series has inspired me to give all five of these albums another listen or two. Writing about the anticipation that led up to them so many years ago has jogged enough memories that I’m excited to listen to them again.

If you’ve seen Built to Spill live within the past year to year and a half, you’ve no doubt heard the two songs on their new double A-side single. I thought they were two of the consistent stand-outs from all the shows I saw - “They Got Away,” their original dub composition, and “Rearrange,” the cover of The Gladiators’ song.

The 12″ is available on the Warner Brothers online store or you can get the two mp3s for a buck each at iTunes.

If this puts you in a total dub mood like it has me, allow me to recommend the following:

I’ve finally digitized my poor VHS copy of the Kermit Keeshan mini-documentary I did back in early 2003. As I’ve written about before on here, the original DV copy and footage had been lost, and one surviving VHS copy remained. I discovered this afternoon that the VHS copy had been damaged, as some of the videotape had been snagged. Fortunately, only the last few seconds of the project were lost. But I took that as a sign that I needed to get the thing digitized and preserved.

Since it is a VHS copy, I cleaned up a few things, like the titles and the warped sound at the end as the tape enters the damaged portion. I’m frustrated with this project, because I remember talking to Kermit about the idea, choosing to do the project, and then discovering that he left town until the day before it was due. It was embarrassingly rushed, and I wish it was better, but that guy you see talking is undeniably the Kermit I knew - sassy, mischievous and proud.

To watch the video, visit the video > documentaries page or check it out on YouTube.

…but my ranch dressing wrote the number “99″ earlier today.

If you’re having trouble seeing it, try this:

I haven’t yet been able to figure out what the salad bar at the Cici’s Pizza on Saddle Creek was trying to tell me.

WOODSHAFT 2002