Sunday, February 1, 2009

One: Am I The Only One?


Barenaked Ladies: Am I The Only One?

[purchase]

Long before the ironic suburban white-boy hipster's hip-hop of top chart hit One Week, and certainly WAY before BNL were big enough to merit their own cruise, but still hot on the heels of their Canadian award-winning debut Gordon, Barenaked Ladies released this tiny, tender song in the midst of an otherwise critically ignored sophomore slump album called Maybe You Should Drive, which topped out at an incredibly lame #175 on the US sales charts.

Folks who know the indie geekrockers from their poppy post-millennial radioplay will find this to be an entirely different group, focused on sparse harmony and string section production, but to be fair, this isn't really representative of anything but the vast spectrum of poential the boys had in their early years. The album overall is decent, if wildly diverse and peppered with a few totally cheesy duds, showing an indiepop band searching for a way to take it to the next level, and not really finding a definitive sound; I don't listen to it all the way through these days, but fifteen years later, I still turn to this song when I need a good soul-searching.

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