Gordon

I can still remember exactly where I was when I first heard the Barenaked Ladies. I was driving in Dayton, Ohio, where I lived at the time, and Box Set came on the radio. It was the public radio station in Dayton where I often discovered cool new music. Not knowing who it was, I was convinced it must be some older artist trying to make a comeback and singing ironically about his new box set. It just sounded way too mature to be a brand new artist. Anyway, I ended up buying this album on CD and was instantly hooked. It's an amazing debut really, showing a level of musicality and maturity beyond their years. Great addition to the list. 5 stars.

For sure Barenaked Ladies should have been included in the main list, and this sunny debut is a fine choice of album. I remember when If I Had A Million Dollars came out and thought it was great at the time and, to my ears, the whole album still holds up. Solid share.

I was gifted this album the week before I entered 9th grade and it really made an enormous impression on me, my sense of who I was, my sense of what kind of music I liked. I can sing just about every lyric from every track. It’s insane that BNL doesn’t make the OG list at all.

Do I think you should listen to Barenaked Ladies before you die? You better believe it. I’ve loved this album since it came out. The songs are offbeat and often whimsical with serious undertones scattered throughout that makes these guys so much more than a novelty song act. They have a lot of fun while exploring a lot of serious subtexts (and in a surprising number of songs… texts)… breakups, bad relationships, the meaning of life, depression… so many things to think about when you listen to one of their albums in full lying in those jaunty sounding songs. And then there is the occasional moving song without any jauntiness like What a Good Boy or Brian Wilson. I’m glad someone put this on the list - these guys are underrated and unique and really belong on a list like this.

So happy to listen to this again after having put my CDs away so many years ago. Such a perfect mix of clever delights!

Barenaked ladies are a group Iv heard of but never really properly listened too. This is Good fun soft rock album, added to my frequent rotation.

A bunch of Barenaked classics

Rating: 8/10 Best songs: Enid, Grade 9, Brian Wilson, Wrap your arms around me, Blame it on me

pretty decent, but not as moving as it was when i was 13. Funny how life works that way. 3 or 4.

Quite dumb 2

Gordon is unassumingly charming but almost to a fault; it lacks depth and substance through trying to be all sorts of aw shucks nice. Very easy listening, If I Had $1,000,000 is famous and fun but also really just underlines my thoughts, it's twee and okay but not reaching into the good territory. 2/5.

Gordon is the debut album of Barenaked Ladies. It is full of pop rock music with great vocal harmonies. The problem is that it is absolutely boring. The music is harmless soft daddy rock and the daddy joke funny lyrics do not help.

If I had a Million Dollars! That's the song for me. The album is solid. Goes down well. Easy to listen to and enjoy. 4/5

Takes me back to middle school. BNL was popular and many of CDs ripped to tapes were distributed. I have fond memories of this album and the time it takes me back to. Good stuff.

Barenaked Ladies have often been written off as a sugar pop or humor band, and nothing is farther from the truth. These guys make amazing music that may seem innocuous on the surface, but hit with the power of a thousand suns when you're not ready for it.

This was alright

This is pretty straightforward, pleasant pop with a bit of a smirk. Some of the songs are bit corny, but it has a brightness and earnestness that's hard not to like. Fave Songs: Brian Wilson, Blame It on Me, Box Set, If I Had $1000000, Be My Yoko Ono, What a Good Boy

Plenty of personality on this one, with some tongue-in-cheek songwriting and Cajun influence to boot. I've never been a huge fan of this band taste-wise, but there's no denying their musicianship and distinct style – agree that not including them on the current 1001 is a big oversight, so this was a more than worthy add.

Brian Wilson was a minor hit, I've heard it a lot over the years. No idea if I've heard anything else they did. Eh, kinda just indie rock with a ska-ish twist? That's not right. It's hard to describe. Very 1990s. 3/5.

Really didn’t expect to see Barenaked Ladies here, but the music isn’t bad all in all

Alternative rock, college rock, folk rock, comedy rock. Ni fu ni fa.

Oh yeahhhhhh

Very smug and self-satisfied, and nearly good enough to get away with it.

Real nice.

Started out wondering why this band's name was so familiar when the music wasn't at all. Then, Brian Wilson and If I Had $1,000,000 were vaguely familiar. I had to look it up to make the connection - oh right, Big Bang Theory opening theme. Oh yeah, One Week. So, clever enough and well-performed, just a little too... soft rock and whimsical for my tastes. I liked it pretty well just the same. I can see how someone could be way into it.

Sure, huge in Canada and all that. But the jokier cuts and forced wackiness/zaniness undercut the impact of the more direct and earnest ones (in addition to being annoying because too cute by half). Perhaps if one weren’t so cynical, one would find it heartwarming and positive. But the straight-up rip off of Paul Heaton and the silly band name are just too much to take – at least he acknowledges same in opening cut. And the overall lark-y effect prevents one taking this too seriously and the comedy isn’t exactly elevated or refined (much less or even very humorous, which is a problem, though perhaps it’s a Canadian thing [take off, hoser]). The playing is fine, relatively crisp and listenable, if mostly tame and anodyne (Housemartins certainly can do darker); one certainly doesn’t mind the jazzy or easy listening vibe but it’s not too transforming or virtuosic or anything. Not imperative to add to the list proper.

A lot of Canadian bands being offered up recently? Not that I'm bothered since my own offered album was Canadian. This is harmless but pretty insipid. Reminds me of The Beautiful South (sorry).

Not really for me. It's not bad though, about listenable. 3 because of the nod to The Housemartins in the opening track "Hello City". There are a lot of elements from The Housemartins and The Beautiful South through the album.

Silly goofy stuff. Not my cup of tea.

I called the Tragically Hip a Canadian national treasure in one of my prior reviews. Well, the Barenaked Ladies are more akin to the treasure that some restaurants have for kids to take home some cheap plastic toy. That's a little mean. There are some genuinely great songs on here like Enid and Brian Wilson. But for every one of those you get a song like I Love You or Grade 9. And don't get me started on If I Had $1,000,000, god what a stupid song. It's so odd to get such fantastic songwriting being dragged down by quirky half-witted afterthoughts. Some real stupid Canadian bullshit in here, I can't get over it. Incredible basslines though. CONTENDER FOR THE LIST: Barenaked Ladies have certainly secured their legacy here in Canada, but I can hardly recommend them when their catalogue is half great and half bullshit. No

If cheesiness was an album. And this is coming from someone who turned into quite a fan of the best Steely Dan records. There are some salvageable cuts on this one (more on that later), but the vast majority of the songs are just a pain in the proverbial arse for me. It's all summed up in the two awful artworks done for this LPs. My eyes are still bleeding from taking a look at the first one on the Wikipedia page by the way, and it's insane that the band's entourage managed to flub it *again* when they went for a redo some years later! Some people are insanely talented, the music gods have bestowed upon them gifts and skills you can only be jealous of. And yet some of the same people are also cursed by shitty taste. Guess that that's how the gods can even things out somehow, at least for a few artists. Apparently, Barenaked Ladies often present themselves as Rush fans. Should I really need to elaborate here? Well, I will, if only to prove I have listened to the whole album. Which is quite an ordeal when so many ridiculously twee songs abound. One redeeming aspect, however: Barenaked Ladies can be excellent for touching ballads, miraculously. Those gems are "Wrap Your Arms Around Me", "The Flag", and also the tender (and admittedly livelier) "Brian Wilson" -- tactfully dealing with the subject of mental health. Oh, and closer "Crazy" is a wild ride that goes to all the right places melodically and instrumentally speaking, just as it harks back to CSNY in a wistful fashion (with an extra use of off-kilter bagpipes!). Hell of a way to save this album from my worst-rated gallery. The rest is just terrible, though. "Hello City" is a stupid opener. In "Enid", the lead singer indulges in overlong strings of words to tell a boring love story -- his overaffected vocal shtick making things even worse. "Grade 9" is a funnier song about the band's guys admitting they were unpopular geeks and nerds in high school (minus one, which is admittedly hilarious), and that song could have become endearing in other hands, I readily admit it. Yet the tame, whyteboy ska proceedings are simply unbearable in the track. As are many other cuts from this LP. Between the two good songs "Brian Wilson" and "Wrap Your Arms Around Me" (mentioned earlier), you have something as daft as "Be My Yoko Ono", for example. Jesus H. Christ, what a way to ruin the flow in the tracklist! To be clear, I'm usually open-minded for all sorts of adventurous shenanigans within an album, but Barenaked Ladies constantly changing lanes get on my nerves, especially since the results very rarely warrant it. "What A Good Boy" sounds like generic MOR pop rock FM radio dross (the year was 1992, goddamnit, so many better things were happening back then!). The latin flavours of "Box Set" are so hackneyed I simply want to puke...And the album being quite long, it goes on like that for quite a while, with a lot of songs managing to sound both obnoxious AND formulaic within their elected genre of the day. Which is quite a feat in Itself, lol. Worse, before the very nice closer "Crazy", you have that dumb hit "If I Had $1,000,000", which probably illustrates how we as a society have devolved from Pete Seeger's collective utopia, as expressed in "I Had A Hammer", to the validation of cynical individualism as an ultimate life goal. Yeah, I know, I know... Those lyrics are supposed to be ironic and goofy. But they only manage to come off as moronic. "If I had a million dollars / I'd be rich", the song concludes. Duh. It's one thing to be ironic. It's another to be so ironic you end up sounding complacent. Especially when your music too often underlines said complacency within individual songs. For all the stylistic twists and turns found in *Gordon*, it feels like the energy displayed in it could have been harnessed for better use. Or at least for something that doesn't sound so derivative and devoid of real stakes. "I'm crazy, just like you", goes Barenaked Ladies in the album's closer. That last track is very good, I say it again. But when you consider the record as a whole, rarely has madness sounded so safe and boring. ---- 1.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 2. 6.5/10 for more general purposes (5 + 1.5) ---- 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: 52 Albums from the users list I *might* select for mine later on: 70 Albums from the users list I won't select for mine: 126 (including this one). --- Hey, Émile. Tu as déjà dû voir ma dernière réponse sous la review de *Young, Loud And Snotty* des Dead Boys ! J'essaie d'écrire la mienne bientôt

This has to be a satirical add, right? I didn't enjoy this, and I don't even think it's objectively good. In fact, it's objectively bad. To each their own, I guess.

This was engineered in a laboratory by thirty evil scientists working day and night over the span of 50 years, fine-tuning every possible sound and millisecond of music, to make me, specifically, upset. Not even sure why I couldn't stand this. Just something about the vocals and lyrics made me feel like the walls are rapidly closing in. Run, the frog army is approaching.

Not what I was expecting at all

Production on this was hollow, they sound too jokey but flat at the same time. I didn't like this.