2003 in Music: Disappointment of the Year

Is This How it Ends?

When it comes to disappointments, like many years, 2003 was full of them. Jewel going further into a "pop" persona, taking on more and more aspects of her current female "counterparts" like Britney Spears or Christina Aguilera is disappointing, but I can't say I care too much about it. Resident-Select Bush continually lets down his country every minute he sits in office -- or sits on his ass anywhere else since he doesn't seem to be in office that much. Comic books can be downright depressing many weeks.

Given my bias when it comes to music, you might expect that I'd list one of the teenybopper crowd or the latest rap "sensation", but you have to have certain expectations if you're going to be disappointed. I expect a Justin Timberlake album to be mindless, bubblegum pop that I'm not going to like. Kind of hard for me to be disappointed by it. Likewise, when it comes to pure shit released in shiny plastic form that's not even fit to be used as a coaster, this year saw a doozy in Metallica's St. Anger album. Yet, there too, I expected it to be crap and it dutifully lived up to those expectations. Had it instead been something comparable to ...and justice for all, it would have been a pleasant surprise.

No, what disappoints me is when an artist/musician that I generally enjoy, produces something that is not necessarily downright awful, but something that fails to challenge me. Something that fails to grab my attention. Something that I perceive to be beneath the artist's ability. Something that I expected to be good, but is merely...okay.

In those terms, the greatest contributor to a disappointment is:

The Strokes -- Room on Fire

Don't get me wrong. I did enjoy the album, but after Is this It?, Room on Fire sets nothing of the sort and is certainly not IT. Basically, they took the safe route that too many pre-packaged (and I'm not calling The Strokes "pre-packaged", just comparing them to such "artists") bands do and essentially produced Is this It? 2. It's treading water and not breaking any new ground. Sure it sounds good, but we've already heard it a couple of years ago. A band can surely survive for years doing this, just look at The Ramones or Bruce Springsteen, creating the same album over and again. It justs gets stale after awhile.

There are many things to like about the album, many of the songs are nice, concise radio-friendly lo-fi gems, but they're all essentially patterned the same as Is this It? Particularly something like "I Can't Win" which seems to bear almost identical structure and phrasings as "Last Nite". It's still a good song, but you've pretty much heard it before.

There is some promise in the slightly different sounds of "12:51" and "Under Control" that hint at something new to come, but again, I say that Room on Fire is The Strokes treading water. I expect broader and greater things from them.

There are of course other albums that I was disappointed by and liked considerably less than Room on Fire, but it's the one I expected more from. Two other albums that stick out as disappointments that ultimately I decided I could write off without paying much more attention are as below:

Finger Eleven -- self-titled

This fourth release from the band (stop screaming already, I know that this is the third "Finger Eleven" album, but they did release an album previously when they were known as the "Rainbow Butt Monkeys") furthered them into a "kinder, gentler" nu-metal trappings and further away from their initial influences of Our Lady Peace and Tool. Maybe it's just the constant playings of "One Thing" these days, but it seems to me that they abandoned giving the music their own sound and just decided to blatantly follow Staind into nu-metal balladeering oblivion.

Linkin Park -- Meteora

Like The Strokes' sophomore album, Linkin Park too essentially repeats themselves from Hybrid Theory to make Meteora. The only difference is that I can't say that I've listened to this album again after the first week or so, and don't even remotely miss listening to it. That, and I still consider most of their lyrics trite and distant. Maybe angry, angsty music just doesn't have its edge with me that it used to. I also think that they ruined the kickass intro from "Somewhere I Belong" by attaching a song to it.