1. The Fiery Furnaces

Midwestern siblings move to Brooklyn and (with their assorted friends) learn to thumb their noses at such silly and outdated musical conventions as keeping a coherent song structure, tying melody at least loosely to rhythm, and avoiding abrupt key changes, presumably for the sake of making avant-garde, challenging, "important" art. Unfortunately, IMHO, they fall terribly short, to utterly unlistenable results. It begs the question: how do you make a concept album when you can't even stick to a single musical theme within your songs for more than eight bars?

We get it, Friedbergers: nothing is cool anymore, so you're the coolest MFers in the room. And you're a bro & sis, so you've got the whole bipolar, yin-and-yang, love-hate, sibling rivalry thing down pat. Now would you please cease assaulting our ears with garbage like "Automatic Husband," and go back to fighting in the backseat of your mother's minivan?

2. Animal Collective

(See: Fiery Furnaces, The.) Also, wtf is this?! I didn't think it would be possible to give Koyaanisqatsi a worse soundtrack, but I think I may have found one. Actually, kudos to Animal Collective for making music so bad that it's an adventure to listen to it.

3. The Velvet Underground

Young chain-smokers on the LES make music that sucks very, very loudly, then ride Andy Warhol's coattails to stardom before ditching him to become "consciously anti-beauty," to quote VU co-founder John Cale. Lou Reed's droning monotone officially made him, in his day, the worst frontman in rock-and-roll history -- an honor which now, of course, belongs to Chad Kreuger. The Velvet Underground made being filthy, pasty, and addicted to heroin into an art form, twelve years before Pete Doherty was even born.

4. Okkervil River

Dear Will Sheff,

Neither acoustic strumming, nor the quotidian minutiae of your life, lend themselves well to "epic" pop music. In addition, my interest in your brood, brood, brood, YELLLLL vocal stylings really peaked at "Another Radio Song;" now I find all the baying to be just a little contrived. All in all, though, Billy Boy, it's not so much that I completely hate your band's music as much as I feel that you simply don't deserve reviews as flattering as this. Have you ever thought about snorting some Pixy Stix, putting on a Dan Deacon record, and dancing for no reason? It could change your life...

Your biggest fan,

E.J.

5. Pavement

Nonsensical lyrics AND bone-rattling atonal guitar riffs? No thank you. Props to Steve Malkmus for being so literate, but did nobody tell him that part of what makes truly classic literature perpetually relevant and enjoyable is the fact that it eschews obfuscation for frankness, introverted angst for objective lyricism? Unfortunately, though they admirably captured a certain early-1990s zeitgeist, Pavement's music today sounds to me to be forced and purposefully irritating. Pavement could have been the second coming of the Modern Lovers; but instead of Jonathan Richman's achingly straightforward lyrics, Malkmus penned such gems as "It took a giant ramrod / to raze the demon settlement." [settlement? sediment?...whatever, who gives a damn?]

Image courtesy of Rough Trade Records (www.roughtraderecords.com)