The Second Annual American Gangster Award...

…for an Album That While is Still Pretty Good Probably Doesn’t Deserve to be on Any Year End Lists but because the Artist’s Prior Work is Genre-if-not-Quarter-Century-Defining Great, but More Importantly that Artist’s Last Album was an Unequivocal and Outright Embarrassing Turd, we Nevertheless Dropped a High Eighty on it and Now at the End of the Year Listen to it Repeatedly, Wiping the Sweat off of our Aging Brow

R.E.M.
Accelerate
(Warner Bros.; 2008)

I don’t think I really need to explain this. But if you want, e-mail me and I’ll send back something about what an AWFUL mastering job both this and Death Magnetic are, so in that way, everyone’s a winner.