Villains - The Verve Pipe (1996)
People love to use the phrases “underrated” and “overrated” to describe music. As if there was ever any consensus about pretty much any piece of music, and as if you could gauge that properly. When it comes down to it, “overrated” just means “other people like it but I don’t get it” while “underrated” means “I like it but others either haven’t heard of it or don’t like it.” Both valid and reasonable things to think about music, but let’s not pretend we’re talking quantitatively by pretending to compare to some external standard of rating.
Here we have a record that is, if anything, properly rated. Most people don’t think about 90s pop rock much. Those who do are probably at least passingly familiar with The Freshmen or Photograph, the two big singles from this record.
My listening project has brought me quite a few albums I only knew for one or two tracks, but has shown me much greater scope and quality that you could sum up with a single or two. The Verve Pipe, on the other hand, have two pretty great songs, padded out with a bunch that aren’t particularly memorable. So it’s true that people see this as a band who had a couple of hits and not much more, I’d say that seems about right.
