Tragic Kingdom

Tragic Kingdom is the breakthrough album of No Doubt with the international hits "Don't Speak" and "Just a Girl". "Spiderwebs" is also a nice song, but the quality of the songs and performance (especially the singing of Stefani) varies widely. There are songs in all styles and genres resulting in an eclectic collection of tracks.

Rating: 9/10 Best songs: Excuse me Mr., Just a girl, Different people, Sixteen, Don’t speak, You can do it, World go ‘round, Tragic Kingdom

Perfect west coast ska / reggae / pop-punk album. Legendary 90s stuff. So many hits

Den här plattan skulle kanske ha varit med på den ursprungliga listan.

I listened to this a ton in the late 90’s. I love this album! I’m not usually big into the ska sound but this album showed me that I can love it. Favorite songs include Spiderwebs, Just a Girl, Sunday Morning, Don’t Speak. Oh and how great is that disco You Can Do It?! Such a fun song! Tragic Kingdom is the perfect closer. Great choice!

This definitely stood out from the crowd in the '90s and brought a lot of deserved hits.

Tragic Kingdom ought to have been on the original list; firstly it absolutely rocks in all the right ways, plus Gwen Stefani was a pretty massive star of her era and none of that happens without this album. It has huge global hits that still hold up - Don't Speak is played a lot but still doesn't get tiresome, Just A Girl and Sunday Morning similarly, then there's just so many good deeper cuts that are fresh and interesting without feeling like they've been senselessly thrown together. Sixteen is a riot, Happy Now? is a ska fest, and while there's a little bit of filler I think I can forgive it because the whole thing comes together to be a really enjoyable listen. I think it deserves a 5/5 all things being equal; it's really good, it was really influential, and still sounds good 30 years later.

I’ve never listened to the entire album because people would always just play the hits. It’s really good as an entire album.

Pop rock, alternative rock, ska punk, new wave, pop-punk. Just a girl, Don't speak. Un 4, venga.

Yay 4 Insanely ugly album cover but it's iconic and memorable

How is this not on the main list? Great share. This album had an impact.

I'm not quite able to get past how bloated the album is as a whole, but *man* that opening stretch of songs is just hit after hit. Bands really gotta start playing around with brass instruments again, we were wrong to leave that behind in the 90s.

I think I wrote about this before but there are a couple of distinct eras during which I watched a lot of MTV back when - history lesson kiddos - they played many hours-long blocks of music videos. Periods of a yearish, across a couple years each, one in the early 90s and one in the mid 90s, both with a combination of cable access (ask AI what the hell I'm talking about there, kiddos) and certain fixed, dead intervals in my schedule that were long enough to need some time killing but not long enough to invest in anything meaningful. And in there are a bunch of albums by artists I wouldn't have been listening to otherwise that I got massively overexposed to whichever hit singles blew up in video. This one in spades - Spiderwebs, Just a Girl, and Don't Speak in particular. I don't think I ever heard one of the other songs on this album before today. Never been a big Ska guy and have always been slightly bemused that what feels like it should be such a niche genre to me has has had such legs in pop music culture. This is pretty popified though the Ska roots are still very prominent. Stefani definitely has It, as does the rest of the band, that rock star thing. I liked this just fine. The big hits, I can say having finally listened to the whole thing, were the big hits for a reason - it's all solid but not quite at that level. Those hits though are absolute bangers.

8/10 love me some good ska, and Just a Girl is an absolute classic! super fun and absolutely worth being on this website :)

An absolute classic of new wave pop-ska. Fortunately, it was not a portent of later endeavors, and remains a timeless jam.

Buen disco de rock con buenas canciones, incluso internándose en temas más reggae o incluso funky. Voz femenina muy reconocible. Podría haber tenido temas más pegadizos.

Filled with amazing singles this album is quite an adventure. Ska is generally hated but this album has to be many people’s exception. It’s fun, unique and pretty amazing. The album runs a bit long which is its biggest drawback but the singles really are classics that can be played for years. 7.4/10

Yep that's Gwen Stefani's band.

Fun, good singles

I knew the 2 hit songs. But the rest of the album is much of the same. Not bad though

Two humongous hits on the same album, "Just A Girl" and "Don't Speak". Unfortunately, the rest of this quite long record applies whyteboy ska / mall pop punk formulas on songs that very rarely warrant the time you spend on them. Don't get me wrong, the band is more than competent in terms of compositional skills and studio performance -- Gwen Stefani sure has a commending vocal timbre that hits all the right notes in a striking fashion. And the production values are top notch. Yet the whole thing ultimately feels vapid. Behind the many twists and turns of the arrangements, you can often sense a by-the-book writing process that's devoid of real personality music-wise. It's sun-drenched, sure, but also superficial. Like the worst clichés about California out there. In that context, the title-track closing the proceedings is a bit of an outlier. "Tragic Kingdom" -- the only song in here solely written by Gwen's brother Eric, right before he left the band -- is reportedly a dig at Disneyland. On a purely musical level, it's some sort of baroque extravaganza displaying Danny Elfman-adjacent goth undertones. Not exactly a pleasant listen, but a cut taking some amount of risks at the eleventh hour. At last. Eric Stefani is quite an intriguing figure by the way -- he knew the band was heading for international success, and yet he went back to become an animator for the Simpsons full-time before any of that happened. Maybe hearing the show's theme song (written by Elfman) all the time influenced him for the music of this cut, who knows? Like, it must have been in his head day in day out while he was drawing those cartoons... Interestingly, some of the track's lyrics incidentally seem to suggest the man was not made for the sort of rock'n'roll circus No Doubt had embraced by 1995: "The parade that's electrical / It serves no real purpose / Just takes up a lot of juice / Just to impress us". To be perfectly candid, those lines perfectly sum up my own take about this record: much ado about nothing. Except for those two hit singles, of course. I wouldn't call that a "tragic kingdom". Just an underwhelming one. 2.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 3. 7.5/10 for more general purposes (5 + 2.5) ---- Number of albums from the original list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 465 Albums from the original list I *might* include in mine later on: 288 Albums from the original list I won't include in mine: 336 ----- Number of albums from the users list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 56 Albums from the users list I *might* select for mine later on: 72 Albums from the users list I won't select for mine: 132 (including this one) --- Émile. Ça y est, j'ai *enfin* répondu (en deux temps). Tu trouveras ça sous les reviews des disques de Blackalicious et Alexisonfire au dessus.

No Doubt is one of those bands that, if they come on the radio I don't turn the station, but I also don't seek them out. They're good, but not exactly in my Q zone. 3 stars.

Favorite songs: Just a Girl, Spiderwebs, Don't Speak ,Sixteen, Sunday Morning, Hey You Least favorite songs: The Climb, Tragic Kingdom 3/5

This is… good

Real nice

I’ll give a 3 just because it was big at the time. “Just A Girl” hit the airwaves like a punch in the face. Then the radio got ahold of “Spiderwebs” and “Don’t Speak” and preceded to beat the dead horse with constant bombardment of replays. The album wasn’t that great, Gwen was better when she sang with Sublime, and this is highly overrated. 2.5 tops, but I’ll round up