It came to my attention that James Blunt is back with a new album this week.
Considering that the mere sight of his face evokes my inner rage, the
thought of his actual music is enough to make me want to drive off a cliff.
If you remember, he was that guy in 2006 with the song "You're Beautiful"
where he wailed on the chorus about -- you guessed it -- a girl being beautiful.
Now Blunt's back with his latest album, Some Kind Of Trouble, which
might even be worse than I thought it would be, and got me thinking of all the other annoying pop artist comebacks from the last few years that I wish never happened. Here are five of those:
Enrique Iglesias
If he wasn't stomach-churning enough in the late-'90s and early-'00s with
Latin-tinged pop tracks like "Bailamos" and melodramatic ballads such as
"Hero," Enrique Iglesias devoted last year to attempting to ride the Jersey Shore
popularity wave with his bi-lingual dance album, Euphoria. The end
result of all that work pandering to the Miami club crowd? A single ("I
Like It") that briefly peaked at No. 5, an album that debuted at No. 10 before
plummeting on the Billboard, and a complete loss of dignity.
Christina Aguilera
Christina Aguilera's celebrity has been in decline since the early-'00s.
After her 2006 album, Back To Basics, MERELY went platinum, Aguilera
attempted a comeback in 2010 with Bionic. Despite embracing a more
electronic sound and enlisting the services of Le Tigre and Nicki Minaj, the
final product was kind of a trainwreck, as it failed to even go Gold.
Aguilera's tendencies for the grandiose didn't quite mesh with the
left-field sound she was trying to capture.
Matisyahu
I thought the world would have had enough of the prominently-beared Hasidic
reggae-ish rapper Matisyahu after his hit album, Youth, came out five
years ago. I was wrong. Sort of. His 2009 album Light attempted to
recapture the buzz that the Gold-certified Youth garnered, but came
up considerably short, peaking at No. 19 on the Billboard. Maybe now we can all
move on from these perfectly-average reggae songs.
New Kids On The Block
Do I even need to go into specifics about why a 2008 comeback from an '80s
pop boy band is annoying? I'm still trying to forget this ever happened.
Sugar Ray
The regrettably-titled Music For Cougars was the album that nobody
asked for. Coming six years after Sugar Ray's previous album, 2003's In The
Pursuit Of Leisure, featured captivating song titles such as "Love 101" and
"She's Got The (Woo-Hoo)". I'm sure Mark McGrath & Co thought this would be
their big ticket back to their pop-rock peak in the '90s, when "Fly" was out, but it
sputtered out at No. 80 on the Billboard chart. Well at least McGrath still has
that TV gig hosting "Extra," or whatever it's called. Wait, no, he left that
in 2008 to work on this album. Fail.
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