Disc #13: Barenaked Ladies (Maroon)

Artist: Barenaked Ladies
Album: Maroon
Released by Reprise Records in 2000

First, I need to confess that I am rather embarrassed that this is chronologically the next BNL album that I own. I did at one point own their second album, "Maybe You Should Drive", but I forfeited it in a previously mentioned trade. Bad move. To make matters worse (for my reputation as a BNL supporter) this disc comes not from my original collection, but from Nora's.

But let's put the past behind us because I am glad this CD is in our library. Now, jumping ahead three albums means that there are some major differences between "Maroon" and "Gordon". First, unrest in the band before the release of their third album lead to the departure of keyboard player Andrew Creegan. At the end of the tour for that album, he was replaced by Kevin Hearn, a friend of drummer Tyler Stewart. To make things more complicated, Kevin, who was well received by both the band and the fans, was diagnosed with leukemia just as their fourth album was released, and needed some time to recover after (successful) treatment.

So, the band has been through a lot to get to this, their fifth studio album. If they were babies when they recorded "Gordon" they have now reached maturity in the world of pop music. This is a catchy album, but I feel that it kind of loses steam about half way through. The singles are dynamite, but all three of them are finished by the fifth track. "Too Little Too Late" is a great opening tune, with great energy, but that energy seems to wane after the fifth track.

Lyrically, this album is clever, as usual, but fairly inverted, and sort of depressing. Many of the tunes seems to chronicle people who are finding their lives to be somewhat meaningless and empty. All the songs were written by Robertson and Page, so it's hard to say if one was more influential than the other in terms of lyric writing. Personally, I found it difficult to get past the musical downer in the latter half of the album to really get into the lyrics. It doesn't help Maroon's case that I'm generally not a lyrics guy. Nora always listens to the lyrics first, but they are the last thing that I will focus in on. It's all about the music baby!

I haven't had a good rant in a few discs, so I guess we're due. You know what really bugs me in the music industry? I'll tell you: the "radio edit". Although I'm familiar with several of the tunes on this album, particularly the radio singles, I had never given it a full run-through. I was listening to "Pinch Me", a song I had heard on the radio hundreds of times, and was quite surprised when it got to the end. I thought the song was over, because it always ended there on the radio, and then Ed Robertson goes into a pretty sweet little guitar solo that I had never heard before. To make me even crankier, the solo had been recorded and then played backwards, which sounds really cool and is very hard to play and make it sound like it fits. I felt like I had been robbed every time I heard the song for the past ten years. I give the radio edit a score of 1 on the Cool/Not Cool scale (1 = Not Cool). Rest assured, I will rant about the radio edit many more times as the experiment continues.

To conclude, BNL has crafted a decent album in "Maroon", but not one I find easy to listen to without skipping from one track to another. Therefore, according to the strict rulings laid out in THE MIKE JONES SCALE OF DISC AWESOMNESS, I award this album a score of:

5

Join me next time as the experiment continues and we get festive with Disc #14: Barenaked Ladies (Barenaked for the Holidays).