The Good Life

Album Of The Year
Saddle Creek, 2004

This is one of the worst albums I own, a collection of forgettable minor-key songs about minor dramas with lazy lyrics like: "She said she'd never seen someone so lost/ I said I'd never felt so found." It's about a break-up – what else? – and combs over the minutiae of desperation and guilt in an American college town where boys and girls make love listening to Aimee Mann records before one of them cheats on the other with a bartender and pores over the betrayal like it was a puzzle; painted with a brush soaked in nostalgia and self-pity that leads the narrator to use far too many metaphors involving the change of seasons and dead leaves on trees. It is quite shockingly bad. I'm serious. I wouldn't recommend that anyone, ever, buy a copy of this album.

And yet when it comes on by accident, because the playlist runs over or by some unfortunate slip of the hand when I'm at home, drunk or alone, it ends up in the stereo, a sort of beautiful warm feeling washes over me and I feel quite, well, at home. It's because of his voice: that of Tim Kasher, the songwriter responsible for this crime against self-respect, who also happens to have written many brilliant songs with his other band Cursive. It's a pity that there is none of Kasher's usual wit about this record, for in the past he has always been the first to point out his inadequacies – often rather brutally – which makes his tendency towards indulgence much easier to swallow. "I'm not an artist/ I'm an asshole without a job," he reminded his fans on 'Entertainer', from the record just before this one.

But there are no humorous asides on this album, just an ugly slog of diary entry after diary entry about all the stupid things people do when they fall out of love. The music is no more eloquent than the words. I love especially that it is called Album Of The Year, surely a joke to begin with, but one which is given a particularly cruel punchline in light of just how awful it really is. I like it in the same way I like bad poetry and intimate letters from friends – because life is sometimes ugly, and songs are sometimes rubbish, but that doesn't mean you have to stop singing. Thank the stars for bad records, even if you turn them off half-way through.