Barenaked Ladies - Disc One

Canadian joke-rock group Barenaked Ladies took the democratic approach to compiling Disc One: All Their Greatest Hits (1991-2001). They allowed their fans to log on to their website and vote for the songs they wanted to have included on the album.

The end result is a fair representation of the Ladies’ career thus far, including two or three tracks from each of their albums along with (the obligatory) two new tracks, as well as “Get In Line” (from the soundtrack of the American animated TV series “King of the Hill”) and a cover of fellow Canadian Bruce Cockburn’s “Lovers in a Dangerous Time” (previously available only as a B-side).

These songs together on one disc reveal the impressive talents of the band’s chief singer/songwriters, Steven Page and Ed Robertson, whose genuine gift for crafting pop songs is sometimes masked by the pair’s lyrical obsession with verbal irony.

Disc One does a fine job of capturing the Ladies’ biggest hits—“The Old Apartment,” “One Week,” If I Had a $1,000,000,” and “Pinch Me,” adding a number of fans favorites like “Shoebox” and “Alternative Girlfriend.” Unfortunately, the fan voting excluded some of the band’s best album tracks—like “This is Where It Ends” and “I Live With It Every Day” (from Born on a Pirate Ship, the band’s best overall record), and “Never is Enough” (from Stunt)—and includes a live version of “Brian Wilson” which is clearly inferior to the original studio version. Correcting these two flaws in track selection would have been ideal (I would be willing to part with the song from “King of the Hill” and would have been willing to wait until the next album for new tracks), but even as it stands, Disc One is an entertaining, if somewhat insubstantial, retrospective of the Ladies’ musical contribution to the last decade of the 20th century.

--Matt Parks