Customer Reviews

Underdogs

5 star:		(42)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I am a HUGE Matthew Good Band fan in America. Rarely anyone knows about them here. They are like the best kept secret in America. They are hands down the very best rock band there is!!! I can't explain just how Matthew Good mixes aggresion, depression, and plain fun into all his songs. They are all AMAZING!! I'm a big music buff, and nothing has quite ever struck me as the Matthew Good Band does!! I just got the new album "Beautiful Midnight" and it is PURE BLISS!! Wake up, America, Matthew Good is a GIANT force to be reckoned with. They are to me, what Pearl Jam and Nirvana were to Grunge. Rock is not dead, it's just in Canada. Get this CD "Underdogs" and then all the rest you'll need of course believe me you'll not be sorry, if you like Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Seven Mary Three, Radiohead, just rock in general. It will blow you away!!!!

I normally review only books, but I had to make an exception. I bought this CD because of "Apparitions". I'd been listening to Apparitions over and over, from a mix CD, and finally decided I had to have the rest of the album.

I'm so lucky to live in Canada. Poor Americans have no idea what they're missing out on without the Matthew Good Band. So I bought "Underdogs". It is amazing. I'm not a music critic, but I know good music when I hear it, and this is great music. Amazing. For a long time I couldn't figure out what made it so appealing.

I finally figured it out. Matthew Good Band sounds like what you WISH rock music sounded like. Like the Ideal of Music you hold in your mind; and yet, not quite like any other band. Like I said, I'm not a music critic. That's what it is to me. :)

One great thing about this CD is that you get to know every song after listening to it only once; after that it gets better with each listen. In some ways, Apparitions is the best song, but it's quite different to the overall sound of the album. Every song on the album is great, yet each has a distinctive sound. I love Rico: "Everyone's got to be something/ Me, I'm stupid/ It's all I ever wanted to be". The best songs are Deep Six, Everything Is Automatic, Apparitions, Strangest One Of All, Rico, Prime Time Deliverance, and Indestructible. Seven great songs would be enough reason to buy the album, but even the ones I haven't mentioned are awesome--just not quite as good as the others.

This was the best album I owned, until I bought Matt Good's next album, Beautiful Midnight. But that's another review. Music fans, you must obtain this album, whatever the cost, wherever you live. Really.

This cd is the 2nd best cd i've ever listened to, it's hard to beat clumsy by our lady peace. but this has my favourite song of all time, apparitions. great song. rico is the 2nd best song on the cd, everything is automatic, deep six, indestructible, prime time deliverance, and so many more....... go out and buy this right now, don't even wait

How has this band gone so unnoticed for so long? I have recently bought Underdogs and Avalanche and they both are amazing. Given the playlist and just how the album is laid out, there is not a weak song over the scope of the cd. Mr Good's lyrics are extremely powerful and his voice is so grating sometimes it almost seems angelic. In "Apparitions" his voice almost physically carries you through the song and leaves you wanting more. I have often described this band as the best band that you've never heard of. This is by far one of their best cd's. Don't hesitate to pick this up or any of the earlier stuff by this band.

This is a clear cut example of how the US doesn't always get the best from Canada. More people have heard of Avril Lavigne in the US than MGB, even though MGB is incredibly popular there, and for good reason.

This album is spectacular, truly. I won't say that every song is worthy of an audiogasm, but most of them are. I can recommend it without prejudice.

Back in the days of '97, I stumbled across this then little known group. I was interested, so I picked up their CD and threw it into my pile. But over the years, I've just found myself pulling it out more and more, even as Good began releasing other things, I remained glued to this gem of a CD.
There's not a bad song on here. It has a great mix from hard hitting (Deep Six) to slow greatness (Apparations); from pure fun to hear (Middle Class Gangsters & Rico)to moving emotional peices (Prime Time Deliverance & Change Of Season). The album's so great that I find it hard to find a pure favorite, as it varies on my mood at the time. But if I did have to pick one overall, I'd say I love Prime Time Deliverance the most.
Long story short, if you are at all interested in this album, by all means check it out. You'll find it's well worth your listen.

A lot of people think it's too bad this record never really made it to the American mainstream, but I think it's kind of a good thing. We all know that bands seem better when they're not so popularized (although they did have huge popularity here in Canada in the last few years). That's not to say that I haven't "converted" all my friends and family living in the US into MGB fans, however! It's just that the American mainstream has a way of killing the best music through overpopularization. The Canadian mainstream, too, but as much as I do hate it, MuchMusic is not as bad as MTV. It's getting there, though. So, I like the way that MGB's music is trickling in increments down the the US, mostly by word of mouth instead of shiny media distribution. Then it's the music that's driving the popularity and not the image.

Anyways, Underdogs - this is the album that broke them into the Canadian mainstream. The band wrote it when they were relatively unknown. THERE IS NOT ONE SONG THAT I DO NOT LOVE ON THIS CD, and I am picky - I like my music hard, smart, artistic, catchy and emotional (NOT emo, I mean moody and startling) all in one. I bought this awhile after getting Beautiful Midnight, which is either equally genius to or somehow surpasses Underdogs, I'm not sure yet. I bought it for Apparitions, which I can still listen to today and declare it to be a perfect song, as much as I've heard it over and over. This album is more... raw, I think, compared to the band's later releases - less than Last Of The Ghetto Astronauts, but LOTGA wasn't put together as well as the others.

Underdogs is more quirky and happily sarcastic compared to the albums that came after, with songs like Rico, Indestructable, Middle Class Gangsters and Look Happy, It's The End of the World (which starts with a jumpy punk riff and turns into a strange, dark bass beat layered beneath Matt's paranoid vocals: "where will you be this afternoon?/I cut off all my fingers"). I'd say this album is more hyper than the two later releases. Deep Six kicks off the CD with Dave Genn's major guitar distortion, not an angry song but very in-your-face with Matt's whirlwhind of frustrated lyrics, and is quite catchy.

I'll say it now: Matt is a lyrical genius. Although I don't agree with everything he does, he is a great artist. His vocals stand out throughout the album, and although they don't make straight sense most of the time, it's open to interpretation, and the arrangement somehow makes sense in a nonsensical way. He's got a very paranoid style of singing that would seem like it gets annoying after awhile, but it never really does. In this album, it has an obvious angry edge to it, while in Beautiful Midnight and Audio Of Being it's more controlled and used as an instrument. On Underdogs it sounds like the band's just having fun... there's something of raw beauty on this album, a kind of quirkiness that shows in Dave's guitars, piano and organ which bring in this great originality on songs like Prime Time Deliverance, which at first seems like a sweet, slow song, but has Matt singing about the smut of the world and of a girl committing suicide ("They found her in her room/wearing a pink bunny suit/and sour cherry lipstick/hanging from the closet door/her eyes her wide maybe to despise..."). There's this weird kind of beauty-from-the-mundane-kitsch quality about Underdogs.

Underdogs is the most deliberate in its sweetness-to-hardness. Change of Season starts sweet and slow, but holds a desperation in its lyrics and leads into a great, hardly-controlled guitar solo, which then leads erupts into a beautiful last verse accompanied by piano. Same with Apparitions and the acoustic wonder The Inescapable Us, in the sense that there is a kind of lovely melancholy found between Matt's frustration and Dave's delirious guitars. (In my opinion, the drums and bass start to stand out more from Beautiful Midnight on.)

Underneath the kitsch, the sarcasm and the frustration, there is a moving tenderness found in every song. The whole album is very grotesque and emotional in this way. The lyrics on this album follow no logical pattern and is a kind of train-of-thought storytelling, but I like that sort of thing, and they're put together cleverly. The musical arrangement is pretty much perfect compared to the trash out there. Compared to their later releases, it's less polished... but in this case that's not a bad thing at all, seeing the pure energy and beauty that comes out of Underdogs.

I live in America, and (as all the other americans have said) nobody has heard of them. That is, except my like 3 friends that watch MuchMusic like me! I listen to a lot of music, and none of it has ever connected with me like MGB. This CD in particular. I don't particularly like Apparitions, I guess I didn't hear it all the time like the Canadians. Not that I don't like it, I just don't like it more than any others.

Matt Good can seriously write. No kidding, it's fun to just read the lyrics. But when you hear the songs, they're twice as great. That's the thing with MGB -- some bands have awesome lyrics that read wonderfully but they sound like crap, and some sound so great, but to keep liking them you can't read their lyrics. MGB sounds great, you don't need to know what they're saying it just sounds so good. The quality lyrics just make it better.

I would say the best songs are "Middle Class Gangsters" (I just LOVE this song!), "Invasion 1", "Rico", "Deep Six", "The Inescapable Us", "Everything is Automatic", "Strangest One of All", "Look Happy, It's the End of the World", "My Out of Syle is Coming Back". Haaah that's almost every song! I love every single song, don't get me wrong. Buy this cd, if you buy anything. Yeah, if you're American you gotta buy it online, but its worth it.

They truly are Canada's best kept secret.

The Matthew Good Band is a great band, but they need a much better marketing team. The potential that is revealed on this '97 CD is incredible!

The frenetic energy of "Everything Is Automatic", the dreaminess of "Apparitions", and the defiant funkiness of "Rico" illustrate the band's ability to switch effortlessly between different tempos and moods, while maintaining the paradoxically fun edge to what is basically a dark energy to their sound.

My favourite track here is the superb "Prime Time Deliverance", an emotional ballad with truly evocative lyrics. And the CD finishes very nicely with "Look Happy, It's the End of the World" and the 7:21 masterpiece, "Change Of Season".

Check out http://www.matthewgoodband.com, and watch for more great things from this band!

In a country where crappy pop music and unoriginal rap artists rule the radio(US), fear not rock fans just turn to Canada. Matthew Good Band is just one of those bands, and Underdogs hands down is the best rock album of (97/98). The album immediatley kicks you in the @$$ with "deep six" followed the riffly fabulous "everything is automatic". Of course there are incredible other songs such as "apparitions" and "rico", but my personal favorites are "middle class gangstars" and the brilliant "prime time deliverance".Every song on this album is well constructed and delivered with force. Matthew good Band has a lot of qualites that US bands ,with a few exceptions, lack.