I've recently noticed that there are three things in a lot of music these days that really get on my nerves sometimes. One: when music fades out. In my opinion, the end of a song is just as important as the beginning. If the only way a band can end a song is to keep playing and just fade out, the song's potential has been diminished quite a bit. There are certainly much better ways to ending music: if the music is fast paced, an appropriate ending to the song could be sudden. If the music is slower or tries to evoke a more depressing tone, then the instruments can just drop out one by one. But fading out? Pff, lame!

Secondly, I really get sick of songs that repeat their chorus way too often. The epitome of this is that one song that repeats "I want to fly away" ad nauseam for most of the song ("Fly Away Song" by Lenny Kravitz). That's one of the most annoying songs I've ever heard. If you're going to write a song, at least put the tiniest bit of effort into it so that it doesn't just repeat itself the whole time. You know, like trying not to repeat the "chorus" 8 times at the end?

The other bone I have to pick is with a specific band: Evanescence -- specifically the lead female singer. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, SING SOME LOW NOTES FOR ONCE! It seems that she is entirely incapable of doing so. This is especially evident in "My Immortal". The first time I heard that song, I kept expecting her to eventually go down to some lower notes; on the contrary, the chorus just keeps getting higher and higher in pitch, with the last note of the chorus being the highest, or close to it. I believed I yelled at the radio because of that. Arg!

(I suppose this last "bone" really kind of has to do with singers who can't sing "normally", so that the listener never really gets settled into the song. Another example of this is "Vindicated", by Dashboard Confessional; admittedly, it's a good song, but here the singer is either screaming or whispering. Bah!)

That's not to say that these attributes make the songs totally bad or anything. "My Immortal" is a fairly good song, but I have to listen to it while being distracted by something else, or I get annoyed with it fairly soon. "With or Without You", by U2 ends the song by fading out, and yet I still like the song a lot. "One Thing" by Finger Eleven repeats the chorus three times at the end as well, but I still enjoy listening to it. It's just that the songs would've been better if they didn't do that.

Of course, not that I've made any music myself, so I probably shouldn't be one to talk.