Overall, 2007 has been a great year for music. From the very outset grateful listeners were treated to some fantastic releases and the months that came after consistently continued to deliver. Not all was rosy this past twelve months, however. It’s a given that no year will be musically perfect and in 2007 we’ve certainly been given our share of lemons. The worst of these, however, are the ones that we didn’t see coming. Not necessarily bad albums, but records that raised our hopes only to heartlessly dash them on the cold concrete.

As part of our recap of the music of 2007, ListenIn is presenting two looks at the most egregious offenders of the year. What follows are the five albums that failed to live up to my expectations. Check out ScooterDman’s list for a different perspective.

5. Arcade Fire - Neon Bible

I can feel the flames already, but let me explain. Neon Bible is a good album. Unfortunately Arcade Fire’s self-titled EP, and their debut full-length, Funeral, were excellent. In 2004 Arcade Fire was ahead of the curve. Three years later several other bands have learned from their success, and the musical landscape reflects embellishments on much of what made Funeral great. With Neon Bible the band has fallen from the cutting edge into the middle of the pack and while their end product was good their lack of evolution was certainly disappointing. Putting out two top tier releases, reasonable or not, raises the bar for a band and Neon Bible did not meet it. It was an 8.5 that should have been a 9.5 and unfair as it might seem, that’s enough to land it on this list.

4. Saves the Day - Under the Boards

The band’s three album project - beginning with last year’s Sound the Alarm and ending with next year’s Daybreak - is not going well so far. On Under the Boards Chris Conley still sings in the overly nasal tones that have plagued him since 2003’s In Reverie. As well, the album lacks the urgency and immediacy of past efforts and generally sounds overproduced. I’ve been hooked on Saves the Day since they were Through Being Cool in 1999, but their recent releases have been fairly uninteresting. Die-hard fans will still be satisfied with Conley’s emotional, bittersweet lyrics - though his crooning will get grating at times - but everyone else would be better served going into the back catalog and picking up any Saves the Day release prior to 2002.

3. Jimmy Eat World - Chase This Light

In the 90s this band produced two of my all-time favorite albums - Static Prevails and the widely acclaimed Clarity. Since then, every release has taken stylistically them further and further away from those records. Chase This Light is basically a redux of Jimmy Eat World’s 2004 album Futures, filled with hook heavy, radio friendly rock songs. This isn’t terrible by itself since the band writes terrific pop - “Like She’ll Always Be” and the political “Electable (Give it up)” will dazzle anyone who loved the last two Jimmy Eat World full lengths - but the band has lost all edge due to overproduction and the songs don’t differentiate themselves from anything the band has written in the last 6 years. Those enamored of the Arizona four-piece’s recent work will be equally impressed with Chase This Light. Those of us hoping with each release that they will return to their former, more creative, more daring state; well, we are probably deluding ourselves.

2. Bright Eyes - Cassadaga

I was never really a big Bright Eyes fan. I liked a few songs here or there - and actually much preferred side project The Desaparecidos - but with with 2005’s I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning I became a real believer. It was Connor Oberst’s most cohesive Bright Eyes record yet and the Four Winds EP that came out early this year seemed to confirm that Bright Eyes was moving in a very promising direction. Cassadaga provides glimmers of this in first track “Clairaudients” and album standout “Four Winds,” but the record as a whole is incredibly uneven and sounds as if Oberst knows where he wants to go but is completely unsure of how to get there. He’s largely eschewed the howling that typifies his early work - thankfully - but hasn’t quite found anything to replace it leaving the album feeling flat and sounding as if a critical ingredient is missing. He’s greatly matured since his breakout with 2000’s Fevers and Mirrors but Cassadaga clearly shows that his evolution isn’t quite finished yet.

1. Rilo Kiley - Under the Black Light

Rilo Kiley quickly became one of my favorite bands over the last few years. Stellar release after stellar release featured country-tinged indie rock highlighting one of music’s best voices in Jenny Lewis. They consistently grew, branched out and integrated new sounds into their whole, while maintaining an incredibly high standard of quality. Under the Black Light, sadly, exhibits none of that. In an interview with Under the Radar magazine the band stated that this album was an attempt to make a record of simple pop songs. The result, however, is a clumsy set of tunes from a band that sounds like it is forcing itself to do something that it doesn’t know how to do. The songs aren’t nearly clean enough to be pop, there’s a distinctive shortage of hooks, and in what may be the musical crime of the year Lewis uses almost none of her fantastic range. If Rilo Kiley really wanted to put aside their deeper material in place of lighter fare, they should have waited a year and listened to Tegan and Sara’s The Con before writing. They would have gotten a lesson in indie-pop and saved themselves from a plodding, bafflingly uninspired album.

© Eric Atienza 2007 for Listen In. Some rights reserved.

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