30 Underrated Albums From The Last 30 Years | Part 2

Part 1 is here. Part 3 comes out in June after I finish moving apartments.

Enjoy!

2006 – Gatsby’s American Dream by Gatsby’s American Dream

I get it. I’m an English teacher. I listen to English Teacher Music. Gatsby’s American Dream appeals to me for reasons beyond their shameless literary interpolations. There were a million ways to be indie in 2006. The strongest strain that survived was Matt Berninger’s flaneur-core with The National. Gatsby’s American Dream was more of the picaresque punk indie infection. That this was their swan song seems strange, coming just at the ascendant moment for bands like Panic! At The Disco and My Chemical Romance who showed off similar steampunk sonic sensibilities in stadiums the world over. The theatrics in “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” and, “Margaritas and Cock,” are exactly the kind of winking while wailing that gets me going.

2007 - Sink or Swim by the Gaslight Anthem

The opening salvo from New Jersey’s quintessential quartet is not to be missed. Though best known for their sophomore album The ‘59 Sound, the grit and grime on this first record makes it shine. Fallon’s vocals are occasionally flat, frantic, or a bit off key, but that only amplifies his roguish charm. Everything anyone ever loved about The Gaslight Anthem is here in spades: doomed nostalgia, ripping guitars, and hardknock romanticism. Not a single track should be skipped.

2008 - Ultra Beatdown by Dragonforce

Released right at the moment Guitar Hero introduced most people of a certain age to Dragonforce, this album got lost immediately because it did not have that be-all end-all Expert song, “Through the Fire and the Flames”, which appeared on 2006’s Inhuman Rampage. Beatdown’s single “Heroes of our Time,” among the band’s best work, did garner a Grammy nom, but it wasn’t enough to escape the gravity well of memedom. A shame since its only misstep is the ballad “A Flame for Freedom”. Triumphantly, “Reasons to Survive” and “Last Journey Home” showcase the band’s ability to modulate their fretboard fireworks with more melodic movements and reach some genuinely exciting crescendos. 

2009 - Tri-Polar by Sick Puppies

A band likely damned to eternal post-grunge butt-rockdom if only for the lightning strike popularity of their hokey FREE HUGS video and accompanying single “All The Same.” Sick Puppies made at least two worthy records. Emma Anzai’s basslines hold down every number and when she takes the lead really makes you wonder why rock bands don’t all do this. Tri-Polar is not a thinking man’s record, it’s the kind of shit older brothers bumped while riding around the suburbs on too small bikes stolen from younger, more-beloved siblings. Despite its autotuned and awkward singles “Maybe” and “You’re Going Down”, the album cuts hold the crispest moments for me. “In It For Life”, “Survive”, “Should’ve Known Better,” and “So What I Lied”, are all worth blasting windows down in the wake of a petty heartbreak. A scream and response call, of “Life is too fuckin short!” transcends any inklings of cringe when delivered with this level of conviction.

2010 - Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys by My Chemical Romance

If you know me, you probably expected this one. The semi-swan-song of my favorite band. Where The Black Parade dealt with a deeply intimate death, Killjoys set its sights on extinction. It asked not what happens when we die, but what if everyone we love goes first? It remains urgent and aching and so in love with the idea of friendship and found family that I can’t help but call it their best work. For some it may seem too comic-book-core, or somehow even more over the top, or too shiny and slick to access that earlier angst and urgency. It is Gerard Way’s heart worn bloody red on the back of his leather jacket. You gotta let it destroy ya.

2011 - Screaming Bloody Murder by Sum 41

Deryck Whibley’s divorce record is as self-critical and searching as Sum 41 ever got. This record falls in the nadir between the band’s Pop Punk Imperial Era and their Metal Revival Act Endgame. At least a few tracks are paint-by-numbers rock and roll, while the three-part A Dark Road Out of Hell (“Holy Image of Lies,” “Sick of Everyone,” and “Happiness Machine”) shows Whibley’s operatic ambitions. If Sum’s Underclass Hero was their attempt to be Canadian Green Day, Screaming Bloody Murder actually achieves at least some of the scale and pathos of American Idiot’s “Jesus of Suburbia.” Whibley’s penchant for rhyming couplets only occasionally rings corny, and the piano ballad “Crash” is the kindest kiss-off I certainly didn’t anticipate would follow fumbling The OG Scene Queen Avril Lavigne. It could’ve been Whibley’s last will and testament–his alcoholism nearly killed him during its making–instead it marks an unlikely and audacious comeback for a band many had already counted out.

2012 - The Secrets to Life by At The Skylines

This band only got one full-length record, but they made it count. Self-serious perhaps to a fault, their songs moved beyond the basic hometown hate or beer-soaked singalongs of their now long-enduring contemporaries like A Day To Remember. Perhaps they wanted to be both things too badly: heart-punching pop punk princes and lung-scouring metalcore monarchs. Had they persisted, maybe they would’ve slid into safe grooves of rock radio redundancy, or maybe they could’ve held out long enough for Knocked Loose’s rising tide to lift all boats. What remains for sure is a rollicking record that exemplifies the best of a perilously inconsistent moment in metal-adjacent music.

2013 - Distancing by Misser

Misser was an offshoot of New England Emo stalwarts, Transit. The late great Tim Landers put some special sauce on every track Misser ever did, though sadly there weren’t many. One album and three EPs, this their last. Every track rips. They’re so succinctly themselves. They were persistent practitioners of a pop punk that had become passe. Had Landers lived to see the pandemic era revival of that tried and true mallrat racket, I don’t know what he would’ve thought, but I bet the kids would love Misser.

2014 - The Brink by the Jezabels

I’ve written a defense of this album before, namely its third track “Look of Love.” Singer Hayley Mary calls it her most personal, and something about the guardedness of certain tracks enhances the heartfelt effect. Mary knows, like Ferrante, that romantic love is not always our most intimate, and she taxonomizes life’s many precious entanglements across the album’s length. Title-track opener begins, “That’s just a girl that I describe, she isn’t real, she is no one,” an ironic insistence, since of course, she must be someone, and it’s hard to say if Mary believes that girl is who she was once, or who she could be or should be or would be. Who is she shielding with anonymity if not herself? “No Country” is a beautiful abstract invocation of familial love. On “The End” Mary delivers some of my favorite Jezabels lyrics, “Go pray for something more, Michelangelo would pray to paint to floor,” and “There's just one thing that I am certain / on a highway I belong / open-ended as a lizard to the sun.”

2015 - Act IV: Rebirth in Reprise by The Dear Hunter

People who listen to The Dear Hunter mostly love this record, the fourth in a five-album cycle. For those not under Casey Crescenzo’s neo-prog spell, the mere phrase “five-album cycle” (perhaps rightly) elicits several jerk-off hand motions and a theatrical roll of the eyes. But I promise, like HBO’s Succession, you can start with season 4 and get the point. Save yourself the stress: all the important stuff happens here. Do the titular reprises hit harder if you’ve marinated in the preceding three hours of music, probably! That said, it’s just a good 21^st century rock record, with big choruses and crescendos and at least one face-melting guitar solo in “Is There Anybody Here?” If you’ve ever wondered what a rock n’ roll Fantasia might’ve sounded like, The Dear Hunter is worth your time.

Only ten more to go. Anything you think is missing? Let me know. I love to remember.