Album A Day: Barenaked Ladies – Gordon

Artist: Barenaked Ladies
Album: Gordon
Release Date: July 28, 1992

I, like a bazillion other people, got to know the Barenaked Ladies via their Greatest Hits album from awhile back. Two of my favorite tracks from that set, the goofy “If I Had $1000000″ and “What A Good Boy” originated from this album. But I’m sad to realize that the rest of this album seems to bounce between uneven and bland. It’s a good debut album in that it shows a band that knows what its doing and has a very clear style that can help distinguish them from a million other bands. But its also a flawed album in that much of the album flip-flops between the charmingly silly tunes like “Be My Yoko Ono” and the earnest acoustic drippiness of “Wrap Your Arms Around Me”. While sometimes these numbers work, and result in band classics (“If I Had $1000000″ and “Brian Wilson”), many of these songs are purely forgettable, drifitng away the minute their final chords have faded. Barenaked Ladies can (and have) done better than this album, but looking back on their debut, flawed though it may be, it set the stage for their decidedly unusual career.

Barenaked Ladies – If I Had $1000000 [iTunes] (YSI)

==TJ==