The least essential albums of 2012

Least essential (second!) soundtrack to a pretty essential TV show
Sons Of Anarchy: Songs Of Anarchy Vol. 2
Sons Of Anarchy had a pretty fantastic fifth season, with great additions like Jimmy Smits and, for one amazing episode, Walton Goggins. But who’s sitting around watching biker gangs fight and thinking, “Wow, what kickass song is that playing in the background?” Probably no one, especially when the highlight of this second (!) Sons soundtrack is a limp cover of “Sympathy For The Devil” by Jane’s Addiction (whose limp guitarist Dave Navarro made a limp cameo this year, too). And then there’s the cover of “To Sir With Love” by Katey Sagal—a.k.a. the star of Sons and wife of the show’s creator. It’s exactly as nepo-tastic as that sounds.

Least essential vanity project, sibling-of-a-TV-show-creator division
Rachael MacFarlane, Hayley Sings
Last year, Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane baited Least Essential with his vanity project Music Is Better Than Words, on which he crooned out big-band covers of familiar ’40s and ’50s songs; this year, his sister Rachael seeks to continue the family tradition with Hayley Sings, a similarly jazzy take on familiar standards, this time from the ’50s and ’60s. However, given that she doesn’t have quite the same name recognition as her older brother, Rachael has to couch her singing debut within a conceit that will be more familiar to those who only know her as the voice of Hayley Smith from American Dad, also created by her brother. Luckily—and purely coincidentally—the release of Hayley Sings coincided with this year’s American Dad episode “Love, AD Style,” in which Hayley becomes a lounge singer, giving Rachael the opportunity to perform some of the songs included on this album, like “Someone To Watch Over Me” and “Makin’ Whoopee.” Like her brother, Rachael possesses some decent pipes that are well-suited to the retro material, but the world really doesn’t need more lounge-y takes on songs like “One Fine Day” and “Feelin’ Groovy,” even (or especially) if they’re ostensibly sung by a cartoon character.

Least essential impossible decision to make
Smash Mouth, Magic and The Gift Of Rock
Death by lethal injection or hanging? Waterboarding or having your toenails torn out? Smash Mouth’s brand-new album, or the California band’s reissued 2005 collection of Christmas songs? These are the tough choices. In favor of Magic, Smash Mouth’s original songs—most here co-written by song doctor Shelly “What A Girl Wants” Peiken—are pretty easy to forget. (They can’t all be “All Star,” thank God.) On the downside, there’s a terrible, sad, pathetic original song here called “Justin Bieber” that’s hard to forget, mostly because it’s an exploration of fleeting fame. (Sample lyric: “Did we have enough of all the Facebook Tweeters?”) Acting in favor of The Gift Of Rock: Smash Mouth’s holiday versions are only slightly worse than the million covers you’ve already heard this year. Still—tough decision.

Least essential overkill repackaging of songs nobody really wanted in the first place
Ian Brown, Ian Brown Collected
Ian Brown sang on what’s rightly considered an absolute classic album, The Stone Roses’ self-titled 1989 debut. And then he sang on the follow-up, the rightly derided Second Coming. And then he released a series of solo albums that nobody really liked, and he caused many of those songs that nobody really liked to be remixed, and recorded copious B-sides for singles that nobody bought. And now he’d like you to pay about $300 for the privilege of owning Ian Brown Collected, a 10-CD, one-DVD, one-LP box set that includes precisely none of the songs that made the world fall in love with Ian Brown in the first place. It does, however, include Brown’s attempts at Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” and “Thriller,” and it’s all housed in a “hand-sewn hard-backed book.” And don’t forget that “hand-numbered certificate of authenticity signed by Ian Brown.” Whoever inherits your estate will thank you.

Least essential greatest-hits collection
3 Doors Down, The Greatest Hits
Modern-rock nightmare 3 Doors Down probably isn’t going to make the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, let alone any hall of fame. That doesn’t mean it’s not popular, though: The butt-rock band from Escatawpa, Mississippi has had two major radio hits: 2000’s “Kryptonite” and 2003’s “Here Without You,” both of which made Billboard’s 2012 list of most-played songs of the past 20 years. Just because those horrible, grunted songs are hits, though, doesn’t make them great, and lumping them together on a “greatest hits” record with 10 other farted-out modern-rock “hits” doesn’t make them stink any less. If anything, it just makes the whole project smell even worse.

Least essential Christmas album
John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John, This Christmas
It’s hard to pick just one least essential Christmas album, given that the vast majority of holiday albums are inessential by their very nature. But 2012’s obvious winner was delivered unto The A.V. Club wrapped up in a big, Botoxed bow and topped with an unnaturally opaque glue-on black wig. But the frighteningly cheery grins and “WE ARE HAVING A GOOD TIME” poses John Travola and Olivia Newton-John display on the cover of This Christmas is only a hint of the forced holiday awkwardness contained therein. (And no, we don’t just mean the equally hilarious photos in the liner notes.) The former co-stars both sound like they were hitting the eggnog pretty hard during recording, with Travolta alternating his vocals between sleepy and deranged, and Newton-John providing wispy accompaniment through an audibly forced smile on uninspired covers of “Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree” and “Silent Night.” The thinking behind this album’s existence seems to begin and end at “Hey, remember Grease??,” but that’s still more effort than the two singers put into their performances.

Least essential album for cyborg headbangers
Morbid Angel, Illud Divinum Insanus: The Remixes
Morbid Angel’s place in the death-metal pantheon is untouchable. So why did various remixers feel the need to touch it anyway on the ill-conceived album Illud Divinum Insanus: The Remixes? There’s nothing about the group’s music that particularly lends itself to an electro or industrial overhaul, but nonetheless, its 2011 album Illud Divinum Insanus has been drum-machined and dubstepped to within an inch of its life. Granted, the source material had already been given such a mechanistic sheen; Illud Divinum Insanus was rightly slammed last year for being Morbid Angel’s turn toward electronics. So in essence, The Remixes is a double whammy: an inessential rehash of another inessential album.

Least essential album with Jimmy Buffett on it
Lionel Richie, Tuskegee
Soul music and country music have a long and distinguished tradition of crossing over with each other. You wouldn’t know it, though, from listening to Lionel Richie’s Tuskegee. The album revives 13 Richie hits from the past by rerecording them as duets with various country artists, including Blake Shelton, Tim McGraw, Shania Twain, Willie Nelson, and, um, Jimmy Buffett. The results are predictably tepid, replacing the original songs’ pop-R&B charm with lifeless twang and the cha-ching of cynical self-exploitation. Naturally, Richie’s famed composition for Kenny Rogers, “Lady,” is trotted out with Rogers in tow—just to reinstate the noble idea that schmaltz truly knows no boundaries.

Least essential albums that need to trick you into buying them
Fear, The Fear Record & Electric Light Orchestra, Mr. Blue Sky: The Very Best Of Electric Light Orchestra
Veteran punk band Fear and orchestral pop legends Electric Light Orchestra—as great as they both are—should by all rights have nothing in common. And yet, in 2012, they each issued the same type of inessential releases: gratuitous re-recordings of their own classics in released order to secure their publishing and licensing rights. Fear’s new The Fear Record is a tighter, cleaned-up version of the group’s 1982 calling card, The Record, with frontman Lee Ving being the only original member. Likewise, Mr. Blue Sky is Jeff Lynne’s note-for-note reproduction of many of his biggest hits with ELO. It’s hard to bemoan artists for trying to circumvent record labels and publishing companies by re-recording their own work, but do they have to hawk these redundancies to the general public with a straight face?

The least essential album of 2012
Farrah Abraham, My Teenage Dream Ended
MTV has made some strange people famous —The Miz, Pauly Shore, Puck from The Real World, and so on—but some of the network’s most awkwardly bestowed fame has been thrust upon the eight women collectively known as the Teen Moms. And while some of these reality-TV moms have had their struggles with the law, none is more clueless and obnoxious than Farrah Abraham, an aspiring model and chef from Council Bluffs, Iowa. This year, the deluded 21-year-old published her autobiography, the melodramatically titled My Teenage Dream Ended. With that came a companion pop album, featuring cringeworthy tracks like “The Phone Call That Changed My Life,” “Unplanned Parenthood,” and “Finally Getting Up From Rock Bottom.” While no one expected musical greatness from Abraham, her insanely Auto-Tuned vocals and bland production shocked even the teen mom’s actual fans and earned her a heaping helping of derision from the snarky denizens of the Internet, some of whom even went so far to suggest that it might be an example of outsider art, or as a writer from The Atlantic put it, “a dark and compelling experiment in abstracting and compressing the vicissitudes of ‘high school drama.’” As anyone who’s seen Teen Mom could tell you, though, that’s giving Abraham way too much credit. She just made a terrible record and, even more relevant for our purposes, a completely unnecessary record.