Underrated is a pretty relative term; for some albums it means they missed the critical radar entirely, and for others it means they got loads of critical attention but still ended up damned by faint praise. So this is wildly divergent in the level of sales and critical acclaim each record received; the only thing they all have in common is that I think they should have received slightly more respect. I’ve ranked it in rough order, with the albums in most desperate need of attention up front, and the ones that will survive regardless of whether or not they get it near the back.
1) Thou Shalt Have a Time MacHine by Rabbit Children – This is a really delightful, fun album by an up-and-coming Chicago band; I reviewed it at greater length here. I only know about them because they opened for my buddy’s band a couple months ago and knocked my socks off; I was delighted to find that they have an album, and it’s even better than their live show—reminiscent of late-period Elliott Smith or Beatles. The songs are incredibly catchy, the musicianship is tight, and they deserve a lot more attention than they’ve gotten. When I listen to this, I want to listen to it more and more, and that’s all I can ask of any album.
2) Holes by Melpo Mene – A good musical friend—who had followed up on many of my musical suggestions—recommended this to me. I, being the egomaniac that I am, ignored him—until I was listening to Pandora and heard a song so awesome that I immediately had to have it. That song was “Hello Benjamin” from this album. At first, that was all I liked, but further listens have proven my friend’s wisdom—this is the type of genius album Elliott Smith would have written had he not died, and/or had he lived in Scandinavia. But Erik Mattiasson did. (Live in Scandinavia, that is. And write a genius album. Not die.) Hopefully he won’t have to go to such lengths to get noticed, but he does need some attention—even Pitchfork hasn’t reviewed this yet!
3) The Great Cold Distance by Katatonia – I went karaokeing recently and hit on this mildly inebriated girl who gave me her number, and a recommendation that I get this album. We sang Johnny Cash’s “Jackson” together, and I deleted her number the next day, but fortunately kept the recommendation. At the time, I thought I hated metal; it turns out I hate death metal (the speed-thrash stuff that all sounds the same) and love black metal (the melodic intense slower stuff, of which this is a prime exemplar). And now that I’ve heard it, I’m kind of wishing I hadn’t thrown her number out; making out (or making anything) to this would make doing so to Side 1 of Led Zeppelin IV feel light and passionless and frivolous by comparison.
4) Avatar by Comets on Fire – Somehow the White Stripes and the Black Keys became the yin and the yang of garage-y bluesy rock in the 2000s, obscuring the fact that there were other groups doing similar things with equally spectacular results. In fact, Comets on Fire is almost too tame a name for this group and their sound; listening to the opening track is like being caught in an exploding super-amplified supernova of sound. Later on, they dial back the pace and turn down the volume, but without losing the intensity.
5) God Loves Ugly by Atmosphere – I came across this album while facestalking this girl on whom I had a huge crush; she’d placed this near the top of one of those “Ten Albums that Changed Your Life” notes. When I finally got ahold of it, I found I liked it as much as, if not more than, she did—marking perhaps the first and only documented instance where facebook has conclusively benefitted my life. This album’s one of those rare works that’s so awesome that I not only loved it, but drew inspiration from it. (The first time I put in, it crystallized a poem of my own that had been unformed in my mind, and I immediately pulled out a sheet of paper and scrawled down my own verse, despite the fact that I was at work—at a job I enjoy, no less—and should probably have been busy updating some databases.) Slug’s sort of an indie-rap Eminem, another incredible and thought-provoking wordsmith with mad charisma perched on the divide between black and white culture, rapping intelligently and interestingly about their own skills, while pausing here and there to spit some furious verse towards the baby mama. There are too many awesome lines on here to list, but among my favorite is this little couplet from “Give Me” that’s one of the better artistic credo’s I’ve heard in a while: “The first rule is to keep the verse true. Even if it hurts you, you gotta wear the pain like a stain. Respect the listener, respect the game, because there’s more to gain than some dinner and fame.” That level of audience respect is rare in rap, and unfortunately Atmosphere hasn’t earned it from critics; Pitchfork inexplicably rated this a 5.something.
6) Live 11/6/2000 by Pearl Jam – Pearl Jam’s crazy stunt of releasing quality recordings of virtually every show they played in 2000 deluged us with a torrent of CDs in unobtrusive brown packaging—so many that it was easy to run away from the flood rather than panning through it to find this massive nugget of pure sonic gold. If it isn’t the best thing in their discography, it’s not far off, perhaps the only thing any other grunge band has done that’s equivalent to Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged in New York. It certainly captures their passion and intensity in a way much of their studio work doesn’t, and shows a side of them that people who only listen to the radio never got a chance to hear.
7) White Chalk by PJ Harvey – If an up-and-coming artist had made something this haunting and beautiful, it would have made every critic’s year-end list in the land. But PJ Harvey already won over damn near every musical tastemaker back in the mid-90s with Dry and Rid of Me and To Bring You My Love. So now that she’s established, it would be pretty easy to just sit back on her formula and ride it until the wheels fell off. She’s done a little of that, here and there, but on this album she dismantled it and assembled something completely different, throwing out the guitars (or tossing them to the back of the mix) and bringing out the pianos, and in the process making one of her best works.
8) Sky Blue Sky by Wilco – Simply put, this is one of our best group’s best works. It’s incredibly beautiful, and some critics bagged on it for that very reason, as if that meant it was somehow a falling off from their previous high-water mark, the artsy and experimental Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. At first it does sort of blend together, but further listens reveal myriad interesting little details—the angst-ridden vocals on “You Are My Face,” the remarkably effective guitar jams of “Impossible Germany,” the excellently understated slide guitars on “Sky Blue Sky,” and some of Jeff Tweedy’s best and most cinematic lyrics throughout. (I particularly love this excellent passage from “Shake it Off”: “Sunlight angles on/wooden floor at dawn/ceiling fan is on/chopping up my dreams.”) Unfortunately, such stylings are somehow somewhat out of style these days, and in their place we have a lot of music that is challenging and intricately constructed but not actually fun to listen to; fortunately that means our best bands are still capable of surprising us with albums like this that reward our time and patience and fandom.
9) In Search Of… by N.E.R.D. – This album is so underrated that even I forgot about it, until my buddy posted something on facebook about how underappreciated it was, thereby reminding me that I’d somehow failed to put it on my laptop when I digitized my CD collection a few years ago. I promptly dug it out of my Leaning Tower of Case Logics (remember those?) and ripped it, and was pleased to see it was even better than I’d remembered. The opening riff on “Lapdance” is one of the most propulsive album openers in recent memory, and while the lyrics vary from the sublime (“Do I really even love you? Or do I love your…BRAAAIIN?” has to be one of the awesomest lyrics of the decade) to the ridiculous, the music’s pretty uniformly excellent.
10) Relapse by Eminem – It seems strange to call a Grammy winner underrated, but then again, this clip shows that the Grammy hasn’t been an entirely respectable award for a while now. Besides, a lot of critics sorta poopooed this when it came out last summer. By my estimation, it’s either Eminem’s best, or his best since The Marshall Mathers EP—conceptually tight, braver and more introspective than anything else in his discography, but still with all of the wit and blacker-than-black humor that made him famous in the first place.
