109. Band of Horses - Everything All The Time (2006)

This is one of the out-and-out lamest albums I've ever heard. It's the 00s equivalent of something like Candlebox; everything is so incredibly generic that one is surprised to find that actual human beings created this music and not robots or an incredibly sophisticated team of marketers and trend-analyzers outfitted with the newest and best tracking devices. "The Funeral" is a power ballad, and in about ten years it's going to seem about as embarrassing as most other songs that bear that descriptor; "First Song" is lame glossy rock, "Weed Party" is lame folk-rock, "Our Swords" is lame folk-rock...it's all lame folk-rock. "The Great Salt Lake" has a neat little power chord opening but the melody is lame and Ben Bridwell's vocals, which sound like Robin Pecknold's with all the beauty and personality sucked out, ruin everything they touch. There are plenty of albums on these Pitchfork lists that aren't up to par, but this one might anger me the most--it's so aggressively boring, as if music were just something you did as a painful duty, something to be cranked out between other things. The following two Band of Horses albums, both of which are allegedly terrible, only seem to confirm what I think about this record. It's awful.

MY RATING: 1.1

Band of Horses - "The First Song"