Vote Now for the 4th Annual Cale Awards!

In case the giant, obtrusive banner above wasn’t enough of a hint; the nominees for the 4th Annual Cale Awards have been announced and you can vote for you favorites RIGHT NOW!

There are a total of 22 Categories in which to vote, and voting will last through December 20th. Among the wide array of nominees are: St. Vincent, Of Montreal, Menomena, The Besnard Lakes, Justice, LCD Soundsystem, El-P, and even our good friends Kanye West and Britney Spears! As always though, you are able to write-in your own candidate simply by leaving a comment below each category.

Voting will only take a few minutes of your time, so head on over to the polls and vote today! Make sure your favorite artists get what they deserve (which is money from you…but you know… also a vote on some random music blog. It’s pretty important).

The 5 Worst Songs of 2007

Generally speaking, 2007 has been a really great year for music. We’ve seen great albums from Of Montreal, The New Pornographers and other established bands, as well as some surprises from newcomers like St. Vincent. Amidst this lineup of great albums though lies a small, but terrible collection of songs that never should have existed. Now I’m just one guy, so I can guarantee you that I haven’t heard all the worst songs that 2007 has to offer, especially since I try to avoid bad music at all costs. But from the albums I’ve listened to and reviewed this year, the following songs stand out as the 5 Worst Songs of 2007.

#5: Rilo Kiley – “15” – Musically, “15” is a fairly decent song. It’s in no way impressive, or even memorable, but it’s not downright bad. What is bad about “15” is the lyrics. Who would’ve thought that a love story about a male twenty-something falling in love and having a physical relationship with a 15-year old girl would be the year’s pop anthem? Only Jenny Lewis apparently, who when performing the song live feels the need to get the crowd into it by waving her hand in the hopes of reciprocation. It’s just that Jenny forgot one thing. It’s not sexy, it’s creepy (and pretty much illegal). No one wants to hear about a 15-year old child who is “ripe like a peach” and “down for almost anything.” No one except sex offenders and 13-year old boys, that is. That’s not exactly the audience I’d be targeting if I were Rilo Kiley.

#4: M.I.A. – “Jimmy” – M.I.A.’s abysmal cover of “Jimmy Jimmy Aaja” (from the 1980’s Bollywood flick, Disco Dancer) was so bad that it stood out as the worst track on Kala, an album that I wasn’t too fond of to begin with. I have to give her credit for trying to branch out from the straight-up grime/hip hop style that she’s known for, but the pseudo-disco production and over-sexed “Jimmy” moans pretty much guaranteed the song a spot on this list. The story behind Maya’s connection to the song is pretty cool and all, but someone along the way should have had the foresight to axe this one before it made it to the record (much less a single). I don’t know. Maybe it’s just me. I’m definitely one of the few music bloggers/critics out there who isn’t completely in love with M.I.A., so that’s a possibility.

#3: Britney Spears – “Toy Soldier” – Ugh. I’m already pissed about the fact that my review of Britney’s new album was overrun by the moronic-majority over at Amazon.com, and then the other night I go jogging with my sister only to find that she has Britney on her iPod. Am I the only one left in the world who has the good sense to not buy into this garbage? Anyways, of all the songs on Blackout, none was more cringe-inducing than “Toy Soldier,” a song in which Britney resorts to the tried and true “I need a soldier” song (and by tried and true I mean entirely overused). It’s bad enough when she’s rapping “peek-a-boo he good” like an illiterate human being, but by the time she’s singing “I need a really bad ass soldier” you just kinda have to gouge your ears out and cry yourself to sleep. It’s just one of many examples of songs on Blackout that shouldn’t have ever been penned. But hey! You can dance to it!

#2: Maroon 5 – “Kiwi” – In case you haven’t noticed yet, I’m a pretty big fan of lyrics. It’s my policy that if the lyrics are a joke, 95% of the time the song will be also. Never was that more apparent this year than on Maroon 5’s “Kiwi” in which Adam Levine tells you everything you didn’t want to know, and probably a little bit more. So when he says he wants to be a “stronger and faster lover,” I’m pretty sure he’s talking about getting his pelvis up to about 100 TPM (Thrusts Per Minute). Ok. Fine. But then he takes it one step backwards in the chorus and says “Sweet Kiwi, your juices dripping down my chin.” That’s just gross! No one wants to hear about that Adam! Not a single solitary person other than yourself. Keep it where it belongs. In the bedroom, in your mind, and out of our thoughts. Thanks!

#1: Boddicker – “Bon Vivant” – Being a pretty big fan of indie music, you wouldn’t think that the one song on my list that was actually put out by an indie artist would be the worst song of the year. But you’d be wrong, because a lot of indie music sucks. Case in point, Caleb Boddicker. I’ve never reviewed an album as low as Boddicker’s 2007 debut, Big Lionhearted and the Gallant Man (1 out of 10 Stars), as I usually find enough about an album to enjoy to at least give it a few stars (Britney got 3). But Boddicker just upped the suck so much that I couldn’t find one single song that I enjoyed for even a few seconds. Of all of the atrocious songs on the album, “Bon Vivant” is the worst and one of the worst I’ve ever heard in my life. Boddicker doesn’t sing his lyrics, he howls them. He barks them. On “Bon Vivant” he howls, “The fooooooooooooooood tastes so gooooooooooooooood,” sending fingers flying towards the skip forward button. When showing it to family and friends, they begged me to turn it off before I finally did. What other song garners that sort of knee-jerk response? Maybe the “Nails on the Chalkboard” song that I just made up in my head, but other than that, nothing.

Britney Spears: "Blackout"

Don’t call it a comeback. Call it a cash-in. Call it expected. Call it absurd. Just don’t call it a comeback. When Britney first arrived on the scene nearly a decade ago, she had two main audiences: the prepubescent girl and the creepy old guy. But now Britney’s much too raunchy for the younger audience and she’s already given the old guys more than a glimpse of pretty much everything imaginable. Those who were fans have largely grown up or grown out of her. So you have to ask yourself, why does this album even exist? “Blackout” is the kind of album that exists for two purposes; to line the wallets of record executives and to boost the ego of Ms. Spears. The point of this album is not to give fans of Britney some new material, but to capitalize on the recent explosion of Britney in the tabloids and celebrity news media. Anyone who can’t see that is probably the type of person that would buy this garbage.

“It’s Britney, Bitch!” That’s how she chooses to start the album, and my immediate response is, “I wish it wasn’t.” “Gimme More” has been a pretty big success for Britney, getting her the highest on the charts that she’s been since “Hit Me Baby, One More Time” believe it or not. For what it’s worth, it is the strongest song on “Blackout” and probably the only one that should actually exist. The production here is great, as it is through most of the album. Unfortunately for Britney, however, is the fact that the coolest part of the song are the pitch-shifted “mores” that follow her redundant “Gimme gimme gimme gimme gimmes.”

Despite the production being through the roof, it’s also the album’s biggest flaw. Britney’s voice (which has never been her strong point) doesn’t even sound like itself half the time. Every trick that you could possibly come up with to disguise the fact that Britney can’t carry a tune is employed here in the hopes that we won’t actually notice. According to one critic, “In terms of studio trickery, Paris Hilton’s album was practically ‘unplugged’ compared to this.” Never is this more evident than on the song “Radar” where Britney sounds more like a robot than a human being. It’s absolutely ridiculous!

Also ridiculous is Britney’s insistence that she’s still America’s sweet, little seductress rather than America’s punchline. She spends the majority of the album trying to sound sexy and convince us that she’s so with such lines as: “If I get on top, you’re gonna lose your mind,” “Coming back looking delicious, yes I know they wanna kiss me,” “I’m just a girl with the ability to drive a man crazy, Make him call me “mama,” make him my new baby” “I can feel you on my lips, I can feel you deep inside,” or my personal favorite, “Baby I’m just hot for taking, don’t you wanna see my body naked?” (Chances are, he probably already has Brit Brit). All this stuff might have been sexy 4 or 5 years ago, but after seeing Britney in every bad scenario possible, these lyrics are a joke! Every time I start to think that she sounds sexy, I have an image of a coked-out bald woman beating the hell out of a car with an umbrella, or a mentally unstable girl who can’t keep her kids in her custody for more than a few hours and whose idea of a comeback is casually walking around on a stage lip-syncing in underwear on national television. Granted, Britney doesn’t do much on this album besides provide vocals (she’s only credited on two songs for co-writing), but you’d think someone who’s been in the business as long as she has would have the good sense to know that the majority of the lyrics on “Blackout” are laughable. At one point, Britney’s singing “I fall off the edge of my mind…” over and over again. What the hell does this even mean? Does anyone know?

In the end, “Blackout” is a misguided, rushed, and ultimately botched attempt at a comeback from an artist that desperately need to take her time making an album that wouldn’t be added to her growing list of bad decisions. After all her time in the spotlight, what I wanted to hear most from Britney was something real, something personal that goes deeper than the stupid and overused “bump ‘n’ grind” lyrics that fill this album. “Blackout” just screams of a rushed job and in the ends, it fails as anything other than a mindless collection of songs with maybe one or two songs that you could dance to in a club. The production is incredible, and if they ever release an instrumental version of “Blackout,” I might recommend it to someone. But as it stands, “Blackout” is nothing more than a blip on my radar that I’ll forget about tomorrow. If the RIAA wonders why people download music illegally these days, look no further than this album. The American public is smart, and we know what good music sounds like. This ain’t it! “Blackout” is a collection of mediocre songs, shoveled onto a CD in the hopes of making a quick buck on the tabloid adventures of Britney Spears. No more, no less.

Recommended for the mindless, and anyone who wants to give Britney the resources needed to continue her depraved lifestyle.

Key Tracks:
1. “Gimme More”
2. “Hot as Ice”

3 out of 10 Stars