5 Albums I LOVE That I’m Meant To Hate

Apparently, if half the world likes something - which is generally what happens when something is really GREAT, AMIRITE? - then it’s not allowed to be cool anymore. Consistently, lame ass bloggers will sit up on their high-speed connection throne and pompously shit on any music that isn’t featured as Pitchfork's best track of the week, forcing us to banish beloved albums to secret playlists.

But, we all cling on to at least one album that snooty internet musos have told us we should be too embarrassed to listen to, right? (FYI, ironically listening to any Spice Girls era pop doesn't count idiots.) So, below is a list of some records I LOVE, but everyone else has told me I should hate.

The Kooks – Inside In / Inside Out

The Accusation From The Internet

Luke Kook is a batty. This record pulled British guitar music down unto its knees and it’s never got back up.

The Fun Truth

I actually really enjoy this record by The Kooks. Granted, the second one is almost unlistenable and I can’t say I’ve even given their third a listen, but, man, their debut is a beauty. Back in the day, these guys were huge, you couldn’t go far in the car without hearing "Naïve" and Luke Kooks strained accented vocals piercing into your ear. Nowadays, however, If I had a pound for every person who still cared about this band, then I’d have £14, which is enough for every track on this record. It’s a shame, because once, my friend spotted The Kooks out in Brighton and threw a copy of NME at them. They didn’t react, and that my friends, is a band with true nonchalant rock’n’roll stardom.

Inside In / Inside Out is actually a pretty great record though. Tracks like “Ooh La” and “She Moves In Her Own Way” were excellent theme songs for the rolled up Topman jeans generation. In a time when guitar music was going so wrong, The Kooks were holding up the fort with an abundance of average, rode on from the crest of The Libertines wave. Fortunately, or unfortunately for me, at this point, I didn’t know much about music and some older kid on the bus gave me this album to borrow. I devoured it and it’s stuck in my head to this day. At the time, I thought it was brilliant. Everyone proceeded to tell me I was wrong. Now, a couple of years on, it’s still brilliant and everyone still tries to tell me I’m wrong. “Sofa Song” is as good a guitar anthem as anything by the Arctic Monkeys. “Seaside” is still fucking annoying, though.

Fall Out Boy - Take This To Your Grave

The Accusation From The Internet

Eurgh, you like Fall Out Boy? What are you, fourteen years old? Don’t they only make records for people to slit their wrists to and whine poetically about how depressing life is?

The Fun Truth

I’ll agree - the bands output post From Under The Cork Tree is a load of unlistenable premature ejaculatory shit. However, their first three records are filled with well thought out angst ridden manoeuvres, that rip the tear stained drain pipes off any of their mid-2000 counterparts. You can think whatever you want about Pete Wentz - dick jokes and shit hairstyles et al - but he writes lyrics that’d make Morrissey weep. Maybe. Back when I was 14, every time I got angry I’d listen to Take This To Your Grave and imagine my friends being on fire and not having enough piss to put them out. Now, I’m 20 years old, and I still hate on girls and still ask them to light up smokes because it’ll kill them quicker. But I do so knowing that I’ve got this record to come home to and serenade me like a list of all my life failures set to distorted guitars.

Wentz scrawled out one-liners like it weren’t no thing, and Patrick spat them out with all the falsetto he could muster. It’s also easy to forget, but these guys were the start of a new music revolution. I mean, they had Kanye West remix one of their tracks and Jay-Z introduce their fourth album. It was all pretty good going for a geek-ridden four piece from Chicago. However, as soon as FOB become cool, they became cool to hate. Almost a decade on, though, and I still think this record still stands the test of time. FIGHT ME.

Mac Miller – K.I.D.S

The Accusation From The Internet

All Mac Miller raps about is swisher blunts and getting fucked up, not distracting very well from the fact he's an over-privileged white boy from Pittsburgh.

The Fun Truth

People always cuss Mac for not being deep enough, but, hip-hop doesn’t have to be all “Cleanin’ Out My Closet” and ramming shit stained underwear into people’s ears, it can be fun too.

The K.I.D.S mixtape is essentially like a giggling, red-eyed Will Smith rapping over some Jazzy Jeff off-cuts, which isn’t a bad thing. Tracks like “Senior Skip Day” capture perfectly the joy of wake-and-baking on a school day and the whole tape holds a special place in my heart with its samples from Larry Clark's 1995 film spectacular of the same name, which piece together the record. So, maybe Miller does rap a little too much about the sticky-icky, but on tracks like “Poppy” and “All I Want Is You” he also taps into death, love, and other real life human feelings. So there.

Belle and Sebastian - Discography

The Accusation From The Internet

If you like Belle & Sebastian then you must be a gayer. All they sing about is cutesy things like love and big warm jumpers and cups of coffee, if you were straight you’d rather hear a song about a girl being taken to the candy shop and licking a lollipop.

The Fun Truth

Back in college my friend lent me a Belle & Sebastian album and I really wanted to like it. I really did. Unfortunately, compared to the new Klaxons record or whatever, it all sounded a little colorless. I let it rest in my iTunes graveyard for a while, until, a few years later I was travelling on the train or something and thought I’d give Belle & Sebastian another go. Now, I had time to listen to the lyrics, and found these guys were singing about real things I understood, like washing clothes at the laundrette or lusting after the girl in my math class.

Sure, they do go a little overboard on the denim-jacket-and-badge-wearing indie, but they also manage to cave your heart in with warm harmonies and wistful pop. Stuart Murdoch's voice takes me somewhere else. It’s like autumn leaves and big hugs rolled into a soothing stream of decibels. Tracks like "Get Me Away From Here, I’m Dying" are the perfect accompaniment to lonesome rain stridden bus rides, helping to hold your hand away from deep thoughts about “what life really means” and why the girl in the coffee shop always gives you a nice smile.

Coldplay - Viva la Vida or Death to All My Friends

The Accusation From The Internet

If there were a soundtrack to bed-wetting and soon to be divorced relationships, Coldplay would be it. Does Chris Martin ever take his head far enough out of his backside to actually make some music with real feeling?

The Fun Truth

Chris Martin may be a self-righteous asshole, but he’s an asshole that knows how to make music so great it’ll soak your sheets through. He’s the master of inception, crafting the most incessant of human emotions into incandescent choruses that stick in heads like weekend Dads stay co-joined to the Sunday newspaper. If, at the end of it all, my life VCR plays through my head, I’d like it to be sound tracked like all good terrestrial TV channel montages – "Fix You", ringing out over a montage of my bloody birth, reaching a crescendo as I queue for budget shopping at Aldi and culminating with myself sitting down at the end with a mug of tea’n’tears and an over-cooked ready meal. It’s mass music emotion for the masses and I’m okay with that. Viva la Vida, being their best record to date, is also, perhaps, the most hated. At first, I detested this celestial shit heap of an album. I almost refused to let my ambience guards down, being too self-important for my own good and declaring this album one for my Dads car.

One day, however, I was fortunately trapped in my Dads car with only a bottle of Lucozade for company. I say fortunately, because if I weren’t trapped in a three-hour road trip, then I’d have never listened to this record properly. Now, it may have been the glucose, but suddenly, with open ears, these tracks were injected with steroid beautification. "Strawberry Swing" felt like a gorgeous summer day spent giddily swanning around the countryside. "Lovers in Japan" felt like a snow engulfed walk through the woods. "Death To All My Friends" was the breaking dawn toward my new found love – Coldplay. Once I left my ears open, and forgot about how Chris & Co were not cool, the magnificence outweighed the medicority.