Coldplay's forthcoming
Viva la Vida, or Death and All His Friends has the
Guardian moaning about the curse of the bad album title, raising the spectre of the Smashing Pumpkins'
Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, Fiona Apple's
When The Pawn..., and Public Enemy's
Muse Sick-n-Hour Mess Age to make the case that
Vida's awkward title will probably sink the album, sales-wise. (Well, at least EMI will have something else to blame for the inevitably disappointing numbers besides "softening market conditions.") But surely we've all bought unfortunately titled albums in an effort to look past awkward syntax and bad puns by musicians whose output we trust? I know I have, so after the jump, I run down five owned-by-me full-lengths that I generally only refer to as "that album by those guys, you know which one I mean." (For what it's worth, the best-titled in my collection is Ill Ease's
All Systems A-Go-Go!, but that particular honor can change at any moment.)
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Idolator
John Darnielle has a message for publicists: "Stop opening your one-sheets by announcing that the state of music is pretty dour but the artist whose music you yourself are putting out has somehow risen above the intolerable state of things. OK? Can you do that one thing for me, please, if not for the sake of your artists, whose promos get tossed aside by writers like, oh, me, the second we see a line about how we live in an era where music isn't really so good, but fortunately for us, some band has come along to rescue us all?" [