For every legendary flop, whether it be Human After All, First Impressions of Earth, or hell, even Metal Machine Music, you will find a small but vocal minority of stalwart defenders who shall forever support the otherwise universally dismissed work. After all, someone is responsible for the 37 metacritic score of Lil' Wayne’s Rebirth, or the continued meek Rotten Tomatoes score of latter-day M. Night Shyamalan films. We may not be all the way right in the head, but that doesn’t stop us from finding some immaculate material within the music industry’s dank recesses. This is a feature dedicated to our personal little disgraced treasures – the albums that we love that everyone else hates, and are long overdue for some defending.
Luke Winkie: ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead - Worlds Apart (2005)
Sample Review: "Worlds Apart is an aspiration, an apology, the sound of confusion." - Nick Sylvester, Pitchfork.
I think sometimes we, the all-knowledgeable, cultured, sophisticated music people, tend to take emotions for granted. In fact, I think sometimes we even look down on them, and that’s not entirely undeserved. Anyone who has sat through a lethargic, bummer-ass break up album for fourteen tracks knows that the redundant themes of heartsickness can both derail and annoy, and I think at times it’s easier for us to take refuge in the sarcastic and unaffected. Think about the traditions of indie rock: Pavement, Sebadoh, Belle & Sebastian, Guided by Voices – these artists did not deliver massive slabs of emotionally swollen work – it’s quite the opposite really, and Slanted & Enchanted was essentially an experiment in how much you could sound like you didn’t really care.
...And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead has always been a band that really, really, REALLY cared. Their entire musical agenda was based on one thing: angst. Good, old fashioned, fuck-you-mom-and-dad angst. Against all odds, it really has worked out well for them. The popular choice in their discography is Source Tags & Codes, and for good reason - it’s easily the best album the band has ever put out. Never a dull moment and plenty of heart-racing ones, and even eight years removed I still get goose bumps when I listen to it. It’s literally one of the most epic records of the past ten years.
But this is the album that came afterward. If Source Tags was the album that gave Trail of Dead their long awaited due, it was Worlds Apart that began to destroy them. It was a simultaneous critical and commercial bomb, resulting in label drops, internal feuding, and the destruction of any goodwill they had developed in the indie community – it literally tore the band apart at the seams.
And here’s the thing - most of the critical slamming Worlds Apart gets is entirely deserved. It’s an overwrought, overstuffed, over-dramatic mess of an album, featuring songs about America, pretension, eccentricity and the like, all willingly self-righteous and without a trace of humor. On the surface it is pretty easy to discern why this record didn’t go over so well, but all of those silly, teenage components simply make up why I love it so much. It’s one of the few albums I’ve ever heard that simply demands to be listened to; it creates deep, dissonant washes of high-impact rock’n’roll that sound truly, truly epic, enough to get anyone out of their chair and yearn for the highway. If someone took the DNA of the playhouse, converted it to the context of a rock album, and added about four year’s worth of teenage angst on top of it, Worlds Apart would probably be the result. It aims for your heart, and hits the mark nine times out of ten.
But that’s the only way I can defend it, and all of the other "problems" Worlds Apart has are completely justifiable and deserve to be pointed out. The record asks us to drop our hardened, cynical opinions about bombastic, emo-as-hell, utterly self-serious, fucking art, and as it turned out most of us weren’t able to do that. I guess it’s just too hard to get riled up by music these days; it’s easier to appreciate songs than to get emotionally involved with them. Despite that, Worlds Apart will still always be my high school album of choice. It’s the only selection from that era of music I can listen to and love even without the context of youth, heartbreak or manufactured angst. I’m sure I’m not the only one.
Noah Bertlasky: Bangles – Doll Revolution (2003)
Sample Review:"If Doll Revolution is the rare comeback album that doesn't shame the memory it exploits, that's partly because the Bangles were never what they pretended to be." Robert Christgau, Blender.
The Bangles were never exactly critical darlings anyway, so it’s no surprise their 2003 reunion album didn’t make any best of the decade lists. The Elvis Costello-penned title track gets things off to a rocky start: the Bangles as Riot Grrrls just makes both look stupid. After that, though, the foursome settle blissfully into what they do best: sold-out, slick, sugar-coated pop. Susanna Hoffs lets loose with a couple of deliciously gloppy ballads (“Something That You Said” and “I Will Take Care of You”) with those harmonies deployed around the edges to add a piquant touch to the guilty pleasure. Debbi Peterson’s “Lost at Sea” is a lonely weeper which sinks its nostalgic hook deep in your backbrain, Micky Steele splashes pop psychedlia against a ridiculous tender-tough narrative in “Nickel Romeo” and ends up sounding both completely clueless and sexy as hell; Vicki Peterson’s shaky vocals add a touch of clumsy vulnerability to the cheery jangle and girl-group harmonies on “Mixed Messages”.
And then there’s “Ride the Ride,” where the foursome reaches back to the eighties when they effortlessly reached back to the sixties for those early Beatles hooks, and you’re bouncing along to four and a half minutes plus of glorious, gratuitous homage, complete with carnival music bridge. The retread is totally pointless of course — but then, when were the Bangles urgent? They’re creators of plastic confections, and there doesn’t seem to be any reason they couldn’t come back in ten to twenty years and make another one just like this. I’ll keep my fingers crossed anyway.
Janet Jay: Mountain Goats - Full Force Galesburg (1997)
Sample Review: "John Darnielle's lo-fi, acoustic passion is in full effect on Full Force Galesburg. As usual, there's little to distinguish one song from the next, and, as usual, Darnielle doesn't need to do any distinguishing, as he gets by on emotion alone." Allmusic.com
What’s wrong with the Mountain Goats’ Full Force Galesburg? According to me, nothing. According to most other Mountain Goats fans I know, and according to most other music fans, it’s boring, long and a bit caustic. It may not be hated per se — most people don’t care about it enough to justify an emotion that strong — but it’s quietly despised. People either forget that it exists or use it as an example of the band’s euphemistically-named “growing pains.” Like all early Mountain Goats albums, it’s lo-fi to a fault, but it’s more stark than other early works. Things often sound sharp and lonely. And it’s not that the album is faultless! It would be improved with a little more variance — when a song isn’t amazing, you hear the poor recording process that much more. And I wouldn’t argue that every song here is brilliant: I could take or leave “Snow Owl, "US Mill” or “Minnesota.”
I first heard the music of Full Force Galesburg sitting with my boyfriend in a crowd of about twenty-five people in Washington, PA at a Mountain Goats show. We were both fans but, due to Darnielle's many, many, many albums, neither of us had heard that one. He played “Twin Human Highway Flares,” the eighth song of the sixteen-song album, and we were both wowed. “I will burn all the calendars that counted the years down to such a worthless day,” it begins, and adds later that “on the day that I forget you, I hope my heart explodes.”
Darnielle’s strength, in songs like “Twin Human Highway Flares,” “West Country Dream” and “It’s All Here In Brownsville,” lies in his ability to use specific details to paint a story. You feel the emotion before you can put a finger on the sense of place, feeling, and character that he conjures. His one-liners can say more than most complete songs: “Your eyes were glacial and your promises all rang true,” or “We are burning up all of our choices up here where the tall grass grows, up here in Galesburg.” In some ways, the songs are more like finely-crafted stories than they are poetry. Full Force Galesburg may be a little harder to get into, and fans have sixteen other albums with which to spend time. College radio DJs once mocked me for digging through the vault to find this album, rather than playing the All Hail West Texas, which was lying close at hand. But where’s the love for Galesburg?
Ira Brooker: Arrested Development - Zingalamaduni (1994)
Sample Review: "As a result, "Zingalamaduni" -- a word the group explains is Swahili for "beehive of culture" -- offers more buzz than sting." J. D. Considine, The Baltimore Sun
Today the hippie-hop vibe of Arrested Development’s 5 Years, 3 Months and 2 Days in the Life of...sounds about as dated as disco, but back in 1992 it served as a vital bridge between rap culture and a mainstream (a.k.a. “white”) audience just warming up to this scary new music from the streets. Unfortunately for Arrested Development, the year between their freshman and sophomore efforts saw the release of the Wu-Tang Clan’s Enter the 36 Chambers. That instant classic revolutionized hip-hop as an art form, especially amongst the backpack rap contingent. By the time 1994’s Zingalamaduni hit the shelves, it already felt a little like a relic from a bygone era.
That isn’t to say that Arrested Development had stayed static. In fact, they’d taken great steps forward but in a decidedly non-commercial direction. From title to cover art to lyrics, Zingalamaduni is rooted far deeper in African and African-American culture than its predecessor. That’s by no means a bad thing, but it wasn’t exactly a connection point for the white college kids who comprised much of the group’s fan base. Since Arrested Development had always been deemed too wussy for the hardcore gangsta rap crowd, Zingalamaduni essentially entered the world as an album without an audience.
Except for me, apparently. I was still in my early stages of learning to love hip-hop when I plucked the cassette tape from the shelf of Musicland at Valley View Mall in La Crosse, Wisconsin (as lily-white a venue as one could ask for). I fell in love with Zingalamaduni because it was an intimate dispatch from a culture that was not my own, but presented in a way that made me feel welcome to come in and look around. In my estimation, it’s also a far better album than 5 Years etc. The beats are grittier, the subject matter is darker, the production more ambitious, and the homeless soothsayers and resilient single mothers of the first album are supplanted by racist landlords and abortion debates. It’s a more grown-up album all around, showing the type of maturation you typically want to see in a sophomore outing.
Sure, it has some missteps – “United Minds” is awfully preachy, and “Africa’s Inside Me” is straight up annoying – but the high points are really something special. There’s an eerie, ethereal quality to low-key cuts like “In the Sunshine,” “Shell” and “United Front,” and the introspective single “Ease My Mind” is as strong a track as the group ever recorded.
Most importantly, Zingalamaduni simply doesn’t sound much like anything else, even amongst Arrested Development’s closest contemporaries. It doesn’t really compare to the buoyant Daisy Age sound of De La Soul, the trippy meanderings of P.M. Dawn or the lyrical be-bop of Digable Planets. The best reference point might be Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, another experimental social treatise packed with soul, sorrow and occasional heavy-handedness.
Michael Keefe: Feargal Sharkey - Feargal Sharkey (1985)
Sample Review:"I had this tape in the '80s and got nostaligic for it and bought it from Amazon. It is nice if you like cheesy '80s tunes...and who doesn't?" Amazon.com user "MacoProf"
I did a lot of dumb things when I was sixteen. One of these was getting hooked on the self-titled solo debut from Feargal Sharkey. In 1985, when this over-eager slab of adult alternative pop first hit record stores, I had no idea that the Irishman with the funny name was once the lead singer of The Undertones, whose first two albums rival The Buzzcocks in terms of punk-pop excellence. As near as I could tell, Sharkey was just some guy with a sandpapery voice singing overwrought songs, while looking like a sad statue left out in the rain. In other words: pretty cool.
If Feargal Sharkey is a bad album – and it probably is – then it's no fault of the cast of stellar writers behind its best songs. Opening track "A Good Heart" was penned by a 21-year-old Maria McKee, whose alt-Americana band Lone Justice released their debut that same year. Sharkey took the well-crafted tune to #1 in England (McKee would wait 22 years to record the song herself, and her version is a beauty). The follow-up track on the album is "You Little Thief," a retro Spector-esque tune penned by Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers keyboardist Benmont Tench, who wrote the song after having his heart broken by none other than...Maria McKee. Had I been aware of this romantic melodrama at the time, I might've been sucked even deeper into the Feargal Sharkey void.
Part of what made the album attractive at the time, but dated and hammy soon thereafter, was the production from Dave Stewart, the musical mastermind behind Eurythmics. 1985 was a turning point for Stewart. In the same year that he over-produced Sharkey's debut, he also steered his main band away from the silvery and seductive new wave tones of their first two records and toward the flatlands of mediocrity that was Eurythmics' late output. In both cases, the canned horn sections, beefy drums, and lifeless bass grooves of '80s soul predominated.
By 1985, new wave and punk were all but dead by, anyway – with or without Dave Stewart's help. So, why not remake a former punk singer into a slick adult-pop act? Despite its fussy and over-worked sound, Feargal Sharkey has some genuinely fine moments beyond those deliciously embittered first two tracks. The Chrissie Hynde-penned "Made to Measure" is a weary ballad with weeping strings à la Dusty Springfield. It's too bad Pretenders never cut their own take. Another highlight is "It's All Over Now." Though it's sacrilegious to say so, Sharkey's remake of The Rolling Stones' first #1 hit is actually pretty darn good. Feargal digs soulfully into the tune, reminding us that it was a minor R&B hit for original songwriters The Womack Brothers (known as The Valentinos at the time) before The Stones went to the Top of the Pops.
Alongside these strong songs from high-caliber writers, Feargal Sharkey offers its share of tepid originals. "Love and Hate" sounds like a reject from the musical Chicago, and the syrupy "Someone to Somebody" is a gooey soft rock ballad cranked out by one of those hit-making teams whose list of credits reads like the name of a corporate law firm. "Ashes and Diamonds" is completely carried by Sharkey's voice, which quavers and purrs with conviction over a bed of sterile soul-rock. Even as a teenager, the song's backing track seemed offensively bland to me.
Fortunately for Feargal Sharkey, his entire three-LP solo career is all but forgotten, especially here in America. His one indelible mark on the music world remains The Undertones' anxious punk classic, "Teenage Kicks." And rightly so. All the same – no matter how many hipper, deeper, edgier, and overall superior albums by The Replacements, Eric Dolphy, and Arvo Pärt I've ingested over the past 25 years – I'll never be able to shake the shameful grip of Feargal Sharkey. As Benmont once wrote to Maria, "You let me stumble, you let me fall."
Adam Schragin: Moby - Animal Rights (1996)
Sample Review: "Ambitious, cleverly produced, long-anticipated by his fans, "Animal Rights" finds Moby falling on his nose so hard it's a wonder the cartilage hasn't been driven into his brain. "Animal Rights" is a catastrophe on almost every level, a record so howlingly awful it suggests that he completely misses the point of, well, music involving electric guitars." Douglas Wolk, Salon.com
Moby hit critical paydirt with 1995’s Everything is Wrong, and went commercial for 1999’s Play. During his metamorphosis from an indie dance artist to a Hits FM station mainstay were the growing pains of Animal Rights. To say that Moby decided to take a more guitar-based direction with this album is to miss half the point – the record is a strange amalgamation of hardcore punk, ambient music, clean classical interludes, and space rock. This misconception may be the fault of marketing, as the album’s lead single was Moby’s somehow contentious cover of Mission of Burma’s “That’s When I Reach for My Revolver,” and people who had never even heard of that seminal punk band suddenly felt obliged to feel offended on their behalf.
I was fifteen or so in 1995, and the album (which I purchased at Blockbuster Music!) felt made for me. To date, I can blame it for skewing my taste – I often want songs to find a great note and just stay there, as Moby does on the opening and closing ambient tracks “Dead Sun” and “A Season in Hell.” Furthermore, the diversity inherent in the record was like nothing these ears had ever absorbed. The aggressive “Heavy Flow” was heavier; the violin and guitar duets (featuring the talented Hahn Rowe) “Now I Let It Go” and “Love Song for My Mom” were sweeter; the troubled “Say It’s All Mine” and “Face It” more epic. This is a record bristling with a color wheel of emotions, one for each hour of the adolescent day. To say I loved it is unhelpful. To me the record was a mirror - in parts lovely, in other parts shameful and raw. At some point, I felt Animal Rights was unfairly relegated as not worth listening to by people who shouldn’t be writing and reflecting on music in the first place. My opinion hasn’t exactly changed, but my aims are different. If anything, my years of listening to music have made some of my discoveries inherent in Animal Rights seem obvious, but the album’s impact on me remains unchanged, and looking back, my personal experience with Animal Rights seems to trump its value as a record.
