Five Underrated Albums

I want to write about five truly great albums that are overlooked or underrated. To qualify, an album has to be one that no one's heard of, or one that everyone's heard of but no one realizes is great.

They are, in no particular order:

Phil Collins - Face Value
Hot Chip - The Warning
Barenaked Ladies - Maybe You Should Drive
Mono - One Step More And You Die
The Brothers Creeggan - The Brothers Creeggan II

Of course, there are many more great underrated albums out there, but one has to limit oneself. These are the ones that immediately came to mind.

Hot Chip The Warning

Every time I ask someone about Hot Chip, it seems that they've heard of the band but never listened to their music. It's a real shame. The Warning is a truly sublime album, full of gorgeous melodies, interesting beats and loops, brilliant production techniques, and clever lyrics. Songwriters Alexis Taylor and Joe Goddard seem to have inherited Thom Yorke's ability to take a simple phrase that could sound trite and and to bend it around a melody so that it sounds like a brilliant insight into human nature. A lyric like "We tried, but we don't belong" could come of silly, but on standout track "(And I Was) A Boy from School" it's elevated to a kind of high-school outcast anthem. The rest of the album is only one step down - from the nearly-as-sublime "Colours" to the get-up-and-dance rave of "Over and Over" and the mid-tempo chill-out title track "The Warning".

For your consideration: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtxAou8c28k

Barenaked Ladies Maybe You Should Drive

If you're my age or older, you'll remember Barenaked Ladies' ridiculously meteoric rise in the early 90s on the strength of pseudo-novelty songs like "If I Had A Million Dollars" and "Be My Yoko Ono". If you're much younger than me, you're probably more familiar with them from their US breakthrough album Stunt and its massive hit single "One Week".

Unfortunately, because the band's radio singles consist almost-exclusively of novelty songs (particularly following the success of "One Week" and the subsequent 'Ed Raps' like "Pinch Me" and *shudder* "Another Post Card"), people tend to overlook the band's much better deep cuts. Maybe You Should Drive is both nearly-devoid of novelty songs (minute-long track "Little Tiny Song" notwithstanding) and filled to the brim with the best deep cuts of the band's career. Of course, it's also one of their least successful albums - Canada was suffering from BNL-backlash and the US had yet to discover the Ladies, so Maybe You Should Drive is largely a lost treasure.

But what a treasure it is. The one successful single from the album, "Jane", opens the disc with hammered dulcimer and a soaring chorus that's among the strongest in a career built on catchy choruses. English songwriter Stephen Duffy cowrite several of the album's tracks with lead singer Steven Page, and there's a sense of british pop classicism on "Jane', as well as "Everything Old is New Again" and "Alternative Girlfriend". I don't think a finer Canadian pop song was written in the 90s than "Life in a Nutshell" (which includes the hilariously lewd come-on "when she was three, her barbies always did it on the first date; now she's with me and there's never any need for them to demonstrate), and the low-key moments on the album from Page ("You Will Be Waiting") and Ed Robertson ("Am I the Only One?") are stunningly beautiful. Producer Ben Mink plays to the bands strengths, layering backing vocal harmonies and very sparing string arrangements across the tracks while reigning in the more theatrical and silly impulses of the band. The result is an album of focused, unassuming, and truly fantastic pop/alternative/rock music that is the band's finest work and one of the most overlooked and underappreciated albums of the 90s.

For your consideration: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4x60wFJUdb8&feature=related (song starts at 1:36 - also, I've always thought Steve Page looked a little like Seth Rogen, but with a beard the resemblance is uncanny).

Mono One Step More And You Die

There are half a dozen great post-rock bands: Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Mogwai, Explosions in the Sky, Tortoise, Do Make Say Think, and Mono (Sigur Rós and Slint as well if you want to call them "post-rock"). All of those bands, save Mono, have received a fair bit of indie and even mainstream success in North America and Europe, headlining festivals, scoring films, and generally being awesome. Mono, however, haven't had the same success. The Japanese post-rockers have toured extensively, worked with Steve Albini, and released several great records (One Step More And You Die being the finest), but haven't had any sort of significant breakthrough. If you're a fan of largely-instrumental rock music, though, you owe it to yourself to have a listen. Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Explosions in the Sky, and Do Make Say Think may get loud, dark, and angry on occassion, but their natural tendencies are towards pretty melodies and reverb-drenched guitar ambience. One Step More And You Die, on the other hand, is like a whole album of "Like Herod"s - huge dynamic swings (with little dynamic compression - you have to have a good stereo to really appreciate this album), terrifying noise, crushing guitars, thundering drums. Mono can get pretty, and often do, tossing off moments of quiet beauty in the breaks between the squal, but their modus operandi is clear: this band is here to rock your fucking face off.

For your consideration: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oY_4EkwzJcw - This is actually from Gone, but I couldn't find a good recording on YouTube of anything off of One Step More and You Die

The Brothers Creeggan Brothers Creeggan II

Really great indie-jazz from the bassist and former keyboard player of Barenaked Ladies. And you've never heard it. Go listen!

For your consideration: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jzn_1Sj9Udg

(by the way - Andy and Jim [the creeggans] have that really freaky sibling-vocal thing going on where it's almost impossible to tell their voices apart. When they sing harmony it sounds like one guy multitracking).

Phil Collins Face Value

Alright. I know you've heard at least one song off of this album. And I know you have a whole lot of ideas about who Phil Collins is and what he sounds like. You're wrong. Phil Collins isn't the Tarzan soundtrack. He's not "Sussudio" or "Another Day in Paradise" or "In Too Deep". That Phil Collins sucks, more or less. That Phil Collins is at least somewhat-deserving of all the BS you've heard about him. He writes schmaltzy love songs.

Face Value Phil Collins is not that Phil Collins. Face Value Phil Collins is angry, bleak, and sparse. Face Value Phil Collins is also fucking fantastic.

Go back and listen to "In The Air Tonight". I know you've heard it before, but have you ever really listened to it? Think of how often you hear a song on the radio that's that sparse - it's just Phil's voice, a touch of guitar ambience, and a drum machine until the massive "real drums" enter 2/3 of the way through the song. And then listen to just how massive those drums are. Try and divorce yourself from the fact that we've had that drum sound in pop music for nearly 30 years now - go back and listen to a few albums from the 60s and 70s and listen to how the drums sound, then come back to "In The Air Tonight". The "80s drum sound" was created by Collins, Peter Gabriel, and engineer Hugh Padgham on Gabriel's song "Intruder", but it was perfected here by Collins and Padgham. There's a reason everyone now thinks of it as the "80s drum sound" - because every producer in the world heard things song, sat bolt-upright and said "Holy shit, I have to make the drums on my next recording sound like that". No one ever did it quite as well though.

Beyond "In The Air Tonight", Face Value maintains its brilliance. Collins reworks a song from Genesis' album Duke, released a year earlier, for "Behind the Lines", a fun bit of jazz fusion, records one of his finest, barest ballads (what sounds like a home demo of Collins at his piano) for "The Roof is Leaking", and covers the Beatles ably on "Tomorrow Never Knows".

Don't hold Phil Collins' later work against this album. It's great.

For your consideration: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=manxPVTLth8&feature=related
I've linked to the live version for two reasons - the two second shot of his bass player (watch for it!) and because goddamnit, I wish I could sing that well now, let alone when I'm pushing 60.