Five Albums You Should Have Liked All Along (A Cautionary Tale)

We've all been there. You're minding your own business, losing a little bit more of your soul to the corporate machine, when you hear the faint strains of quality music drifting over from the next cubicle. Suddenly the otherwise competent, saavy person next to you says, "Hey, I'm really getting into this Frou Frou album - have you heard it?"

At which point it is your right - nay, your very duty! - to laugh in their face or, at the very least, subject them to a withering eye roll. Not necessarily because you are lucky enough to have Captain Calamity on your side to hip you to this stuff 18 months before it gets its turn through the VH1 meat-grinder, making it safe for popular consumption. You must mock this person so they learn not only the important lesson of keeping up with decent music but that you never admit to anyone else that you just bought an album that came out 5 years ago. Denial is half the battle.

Friends don't let friends experience this kind of shame. Get with the program. I won't tell if you won't.


Duncan Sheik / Daylight (2002)
Kind of par for the course, really - Atlantic Records manages to completely mishandle the most commercial-sounding album the guy has ever made. Yes, even moreso than the one that spawned "Barely Breathing" and made it a veritable standard in dentist offices across the nation. I know a lot of people got forever turned off when that song reached ubiquitous levels because, yeah, we get it - you can't find the air. And even if you were able to avoid that, he started churning out that Buddhist-inspired weirdness and getting all tedious and low-fi and making Low look like balls-to-the-wall rock and rollers. But for one shining moment, he got his shit together and wrote some fantastic, unconventionally hooky songs about grown-up relationships, personal reinvention, conversations with Satan, and the strange experience of seeing someone you used to sleep with posing naked in a widely-distributed publication.


Ricky Warwick / Tattoos & Alibis (2003)
When you stop to consider that Ricky Warwick used to be the frontman for The Almighty and wrote songs called "Meathook" and "White Anger Comedown," it makes it all the more amazing that he released a solo album that's a) largely acoustic and b) capably articulates the sentiment of "Here's to your enemies / Be sure that you wish them all the best from me" without the benefit of crushing guitars or the slightest hint of irony. I only became aware of his existence because he was opening up amphitheater shows for Def Leppard...playing acoustic by himself, which is pretty ballsy in front of a crowd that's drunk on Miller Lite and waiting to rock out to "Pour Some Sugar On Me." The first time that I saw him, I had a good laugh over the fact that he started his set with a song called "Mysterioso." Because, seriously? The chorus was "This world is so mysterioso." The burly Irish metal guy was making up words. But I saw a lot of Def Leppard shows on that tour, and at some point that damn "Mysterioso" song got catchier and catchier. Made-up words aside, Ricky Warwick is an excellent lyricist for a man who wears a cut-off denim vest.


BT / Movement In Still Life (2000)
Sometimes it takes a really pretty white boy from Maryland to put some soul back into electronic music. At times, BT is sort of like Trent Reznor after a heavy dose of Zoloft and some excellent highlights. After spending a lot of time trying to make people dance (see also: "do ecstacy in a field") to Sarah McLachlan and Tori Amos - often with mixed results, since college-girl angst + breakbeats = awkward - he released his own album and created a varied soundscape of hip-hop, trance and spoken word (M. Doughty loves those English girls with ghetto names, by the way). Ironically enough for a producer/DJ, it's best realized with his own vocals on the melancholy epic "Shame." Sometimes it doesn't have to be all about pigs and shit and fucking, eh, Trent? Just putting that out there. Sometimes the people just want to get funky. NB: I was kind of torn, to be honest, between this and the 2003 follow-up Emotional Technology. As a matter of fact, get both.


Mike Viola & The Candy Butchers / Falling Into Place (1999)
For those times when you find Fountains of Wayne too self-consciously irreverant and Elvis Costello too much of an asshole, Mike Viola has all your retro-influenced, tie-wearing indie-pop needs covered. As a matter of fact, he rocks a lot more than both of the aforementioned and injects a lot darker edge. Who doesn't enjoy a healthy dose of self-hating with their Wurlitzer? Then again I would probably hate myself a little too if my primary claim to fame was handling vocal duties on "That Thing You Do!"


Moke / Carnival (2001)
England, in general, rocks pretty hard.

Except when we're talking about Mika, in which case it swishes extravagantly and sings in falsetto.

This is not Mika.