HateYourMusic 2023

The worst albums on RateYourMusic's end of year list

Rateyourmusic.com is not the worst website that spawned from 4chan. I think that is safe to say. It is, by the same token, a website that spawned from 4chan so it is also safe to say that there is a lot going on there. 

If you are not familiar with rateyourmusic's work (I will from this point forward refer to it as it is colloquially known: RYM), imagine letterboxd but instead of movies it's music and instead of normal users who you could have a conversation with at a party, it's shut-ins who deeply hate others and do not experience positive emotions. "Music is their life," you could say. Users upload albums, EPs, singles, live albums, bootlegs, DJ mixes, etc to the website and then rate them on a five star scale. These ratings are then aggregated, weighted, and collated into something of a cohesive "taste." RYM-core if you will. You can probably imagine what these charts look like. If you can't, their top 10 albums of all time are by Kendrick Lamar, Radiohead, Pink Floyd, Madvillain, Radiohead again, King Crimson, Radiohead again, Kendrick Lamar again, My Bloody Valentine, and Radiohead again. Just kidding, that last one would be ridiculous. It's Pink Floyd again. Sure, most of those albums are good (except the King Crimson record which sucks major ass. I don't need to develop an opinion on Pink Floyd), but it's kind of ridiculous for three artists to make up 70% of the top ten and speaks to the hive mind that has developed on RYM. 

Today's focus is on RYM's Best Albums of 2023 list. Of their top 25 I've listened to 15. Six of those are good to me, some of the others are just fine, but five of them are straight up bad to me so that's what we're gonna talk about today. It's time to HateYourMusic. 

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#24 underscores - wallsocket

I will refrain from being too mean about this one because I respect that she took a big swing here. This record just really doesn’t work for me. It’s trying to be epic and at times has the shadows of something reaching those heights but the oomph is just not behind the punch. Her singing voice does not sound all that good and it’s not interesting in a bad way either—just floating in an in-between chasm. Unfair addendum that is not underscores’ fault because it’s the way everyone talks now and fans seem to really love it but let’s please stop referring to every single album cycle as an “era.” I feel like that parlance should be reserved for people like David Bowie, Charli XCX, my good friend Alexio and maybe nobody else. 

#13 King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard - i ain't reading all that / i'm happy for u tho / or sorry that happened

Once the band at the bottom of the festival lineup that looked like a parody group, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard have tripled their poster font size and ten X’d their discography. They are best and most often described as prolific which is the polite way to say they have a great work ethic and a just OK catalog. I tapped out in 2017, the year they promised to make and release five studio albums and actually did do it. But by Polygondwanaland it was clear the ambitious project of a rock band putting out a whole hand of records in a calendar year was not much more than novelty. They’ve dialed it back a touch but not really — they’ve put out 11 studio albums since and tour their pants off (they are already booked through 2024, hitting South America and Europe before embarking on a trip through the US with three-hour marathon sets and engagements at some of the country’s most iconic venues) (as an aside, some of these venue names: Megacorp Pavilion Outdoor, ExploreAshville.com Arena, Miller High Life Theatre, The Rady Shell at Jacobs Park, Mardi Gras World (not a festival, a museum), JJ’s Live, and my favorite: Toronto’s Budweiser Stage). What I find most frustrating about The Gizz is that they could be a great band with great songs and great records but they are too occupied with being the most band with the most songs and the most records. There are diminishing returns to authoring a laundry list, but I suppose I’m on an island here as they’ve cultivated a diet-Dead following. Who am I to question the artistic choices of very savvy businessmen?

#8 George Clanton - Ooh Rap I Ya

My reaction to seeing the words “George Clanton’s new album Ooh Rap I Ya” for the first time? Fuck you! I truly loathe when artists name themselves an off-kilter riff of an already famous person (especially another musician) but it turns out his parents actually named him George Clanton so fair enough I guess. You can’t really ask him to not go by his actual name but can we? Whatever. This is only somewhat beside the point. His dogshit titling instincts are wide reaching as this is the stupidest name for an album this year and we just talked about a King Gizzard album! I listened to this album while walking aimlessly around Portland on a warm summer day and it managed to piss me off. Do you know how terrible something has to be to piss me off on a warm summer day in Portland? Pretty terrible! I was forgetting the music as I was listening to it—a miraculously unengaging suite of songs that I am not even going to do the dignity of revisiting for this paragraph. Not even worth a hate listen; what a sad state of affairs.

#7 Jessie Ware - That! Feels Good!

This! Album's Mid! Jessie Ware has made two of the top seven disco albums of all time according to RYM. This is an institutional failure. I truly do not know how a collective group of people can come to this conclusion, even by accident. There is no there there; a void of intrigue. I will doff my cap to the 10 song, 40 minute runtime: a formula I believe should be something like industry standard. 

A good barometer for disco is to ask yourself a question: does this feel closer to Sister Sledge or the Seinfeld theme song? Bad news for Jessie—it’s the latter. She opens the album incanting, “If you're gonna do it do it well” and proceeds to very much not take her own advice. Nothing on this record smacks and I mean that in the literal sense. No physicality at all. What a sin! It’s mixed poorly and tastes like watered down soda. “Lightning” literally made me groan multiple times; Jessie trying to do SZA? No dice!

Another good barometer for disco is to imagine a bar DJ transitioning from ABBA into whatever you're trying to judge. A tall order but it’s important to apply rigor. If we went from anything off GOLD to anything off That! Feels Good! I would feel like I just got table-topped: shocked, bruised, embarrassed. “Shake the Bottle” is a glimmer of hope that perhaps she will ditch disco to explore a Grace Jones sound. I bet Ware could do the fierce, sultry spoken word stuff pretty well. There is no reason to think she will shift gears but let’s hope she does because if she has any bombast in her bag she has yet to show it.

#1 JPEGMAFIA & Danny Brown - Scaring the Hoes

The problem with being an internet rapper is that you’ve resigned yourself to a rapidly approaching expiration date. Such is the fate of any public person who is extremely online and whose fanbase is even more so. It’s a good gig while you can get it —a rabid horde sells out your shows, buys your entire discography on Bandcamp, turns your merchandise into a micro economy— but you’re driving a car 100 miles per hour directly towards a brick wall. The ever increasing demand to keep getting weirder, louder, and more extreme will eventually cause you to crash and burn.

This is the worst sounding record I heard all year. I imagine this is how 100 gecs sounds to people who don't like 100 gecs. Really disappointing effort as I love Danny Brown and used to love JPEGMAFIA. Bafflingly mixed. Did they record this with a laptop microphone? These guys have lots of money! Did they listen to this before they published it? I can't imagine a single sound system on which you’d hear this and think it’s worth releasing. Scaring the Hoes makes Mike Dean look like a mastering god. No memorable bars because you can't hear anything they're saying and the instrumentals are so warbled that you can't even relish in the interesting moments. They managed to make a "Milkshake" sample tedious! Crappy sounding music can sound incredible (check out SAVED! by Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter) but this is bad for what reason? It is not accomplishing anything other than a migraine.