Does anybody make non-boring music anymore?

So I just went through a couple of new CDs, and while neither was bad in any way, they were both just plain boring.

Tyler Ramsey's "A Long Dream About Swimming Across the Sea" starts off okay with the title track. Its the kind of opener that piques your interest and has you thinking that the album could possibly pick up steam. Much to the listener's chagrin, it does just the opposite. It is pretty in parts and he has a good "sound" but there isn't anything remotely catchy for the rest of the album. I found myself having no idea if songs had switched, I even tried to listen to the lyrics but found myself not paying attention faster than an 8th grader in math class with ADD sitting across from the hot girl who has a bit of her panties showing. Its great background music. Its not worth paying any money for. The title track is a borderline downloadable track that might fit nicely on a mix cd that some college guy makes for the girl he has a stupid crush on.

The Constantines new album, Kensington Heights, is a slight step up in the interstingness factor and even has a song that I might, in theory, pay actual money for, New King. The rest of the CD is moderately catchy, although not much of anything that I would ever find myself thinking "oh yeah, that Constantines album, I should listen to that." Again, they have a good sound, but seem to just have a total inability to write a catchy song. Maybe its always been like this, but recently I've noticed a major trend of bands that concentrate on forging their "sound" and forget that they need to write good songs. I think its mostly due to the major success of "indie" acts that were mostly succesful because of their "sound". Bands like Iron & Wine, My Morning Jacket, The Arcade Fire and even to an extent, post The Bends Radiohead. The thing that these newer bands have forgotten is that those bands wrote a lot of really fucking good songs.

Your sound can only take you so far. An album that sounds like a really great producer took several really bad tracks and said "I'm going to make these songs as good as they can possiby be given their limitations" holds no interest for me. At some point in time these "fucking awesome bands you've never heard of" have to write actual good songs. I don't really give a shit how much you sound like you're peacefully playing your guitar by the river and reminding me of lost high school loves, I will stop paying attention and starting looking at facebook while listening to fucking Nelly if you don't write something that is at least moderately catchy. These are albums full of filler. The songs that many bands use to segue from their hits and build up tension. But tension just sucks if there is no release and these bands apparently can't write songs good enough for the release. They provide lots of fodder for indie kids to make mix cds that show off how awesome their musical knowledge is, but for me, I'll look elsewhere.

Additionally, throw the new M83 album, Saturdays = Youth, in that camp of great sound and a lot of really fucking boring songs.

http://www.live4ever.us/mp3s/solvemymystery_demo.mp3