0.3.2 - My name // is whatever you decide
I get it, naming things is hard. Names are important, they have power and weight and meaning. You can stop people mid-flow talking about an idea or a film or a character or a song when you say "OK, but what's it called?", and the shutters go down behind their eyes/the creative process freezes in place like it was encased in ice. And that's just one person. Now imagine you need to find a name that two, or three, or five, or eight, (or thirty nine if you are The Polyphonic Spree) people all agree is good and appropriate and most of all, cool and memorable.
Why then does the eponymous / self-titled album irritate me the way that it does? Is it worse when it's the first album in a band's catalogue, or if it comes several releases into a discography? Is there ever a good reason to release a self-titled album? These are all questions I've spent the day thinking about while listening to a selection of self-titled albums, and while I don't have any cold hard facts for you, I do have a bunch of opinions - and this is my tiny slice of the internet, the domain registration I refused to let lapse for seven years despite me doing nothing with it, and the comments are disabled - so in this place, my opinion is as close to fact as you are going to get.
Fair warning, this topic has sent me down a pretty vast and mysterious mental rabbit hole, because it's made me think about the foundational concept of what an album title should be. Is having a title track preferable to a just being a self-titled album? If your title track doesn't describe a larger vision for what this collection of music represents, are you really just calling your album "Please Please Me (and 13 other songs which aren't as important)"? If you name it something not referenced in the song titles, how do you condense your collection of songs into a single word or phrase (or 90 word poem if you are Fiona Apple) and make it resonate with people? Does it have to? Do album titles inherit meaning because of the collection of songs it comes to represent? More Songs About Buildings And Food doesn't explicitly contain any songs about buildings or food, and there aren't prior songs about those topics (except, I guess, in the wider, 'all music' sense) that it could contain more of anyway, is that false advertising?
I'd be genuinely interested to know what the marketing received wisdom is about album titles. There has to be some; somewhere in a filing cabinet is some market research that says "90's kids don't care about album titles and think they are lame". If those marketing executives want another data point, here's my power rankings of how to pick your album title.
6) Self titled/no title - lazy, reeks of going to the pub early/no-one having a good idea
5) Album title which is just filler - Anything which is called something like "Presenting...", or "...Sings the hits". Group in also any dumb winky ironic joke-about album title tropes, so calling your debut album "Greatest Hits" or something equally asinine appears here too.
4) Title track - dismissive of other music on that album; works better if the title track and album title are also representative of the themes for the whole album (e.g. Blame My Ex by The Beaches is both a track on the album but the whole album is about those themes). The lowest acceptable bar of album titleage for me.
3) Album title that's seemingly unrelated but sounds cool - You made the effort to give your album a name, and it might not link thematically to what's on the record in an obvious fashion, but eventually for the listeners of said album, the title might take on its own meaning.
2) Album title with a good thematic link but no title track - Nearly the platonic ideal, you came in with intent, everything works together relatively harmoniously, its almost like it is meant be a coherent work of art as a whole!
1) As above, but the album title is referenced in the lyrics of a song - Like the above, but there's something particularly satisfying about bookending the high level ideal of an album title with an element as granular as song lyrics, especially when that short lyric/stanza can be representative of the albums themes as a whole. Top marks, extra credit.
So, having established that self-titled albums are the worst possible way to name the collection of songs you worked so hard on, what makes a band choose to release a self-titled album, and does it matter where in your discography that comes? Certainly amongst the nine self-titled albums I listened to this week, doing it for your debut album seems to be the style (or rather, it comes in and out of fashion); you get a bit of clemency from me when it comes to dropping a self-titled album first. When you're a new band, uncertain you will even get to album number two, why not just say "we are Placebo, and here's a collection of our music, please enjoy it"? I still think it lacks ambition, and I'd really just prefer you to give it a title track than just leave it blank - just name it after your first single, and save me and anyone else having to make up an album title for you based on the album art or some other esoteric reason (look, if you want your album to be called 'The Blue Album' or 'The Black Album', JUST CALL IT THAT. Swifties calling Taylor Swifts self-titled album 'Debut' is a much better name than 'Taylor Swift', so just call it that!).
So, before I embark on talking about the albums I listened to in brief, let me make a plea to any aspiring musicians reading this in the future - give your album a name. You'll thank me later.
So, albums then. I saw the video for Queer by Garbage on some music channel - 1995 was too late for it to be when our family had access to MTV, so almost certainly either it was at my friend D's place where MTV was often on in the background while we played games, or it was on a late night Channel 4 TV show like The Word. Either way; 1995 Shirley Manson might have been pulled, Weird Science style our of my young adult libido (let's not kid ourselves, 2025 Shirley Manson is still omega hot); also the electro-rock-alternative-goth style of the music was totally my jam. This album was on regular repeat in my household (as is the rest of their discography), and gets my strongest recommendation.
You can also copy the above paragraph word-for-word and just find/replace Shirley Manson with Brian Molko from Placebo and the results would be 100% valid. Placebo are the band I have seen live the highest number of times (now at eight) which should give you an idea of what I feel about this album and how it has in some ways shaped me as a human being.
Do I need to talk at length about Metallica? (the album, I mean, I'll certainly talk at length about the band in the future. Also this is why self-titled albums suck). It's widely acknowledged as one of the biggest crossover hits of all time and transitioned Metallica from a niche Heavy Metal band into a stadium filling Hard Rock band, with all the complications that brings. I liked them before everyone liked them, but I've got time for both pre-and-post Black Album Metallica.
Roxy Music is amongst a large number of albums I've listened to for this project so far where I know only one song very well off the album (in this case, Virginia Plain, mainly thanks to the music video with Jerry Hall in being on MTV a lot back when we DID have MTV at home). Bryan Ferry and the whole art-rock thing has always sat slightly at an angle to my own music taste, and listening to this whole album confirmed to me that my tastes haven't changed that much, even though I still think Virginia Plain lives amongst the pantheon of great songs of the 80's.
I love The Band, both album and group, though they decided to go the self-titled route for their second album which I find exquisitely puzzling. This album in particular is such a great condensation of the kind of storytelling Americana that can be so evocative of a time and place (like much more modern counterpart Midlake's The Trials of Van Occupanther - now that's an album name) I feel the vacancy here where an album title should sit. If you've not heard The Band, please go listen to The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, and if that floats your boat, listen to the rest of the album. There's no better expression of mournful country blues than that. On a sidenote, I put that song on a mixtape I made for my friend Matt in May of 2024 and then found out months later that The Band are his favourite band of all time (prior to my recommendation). That's a very Matt favourite band to have.
I definitely saw Weezer perform The Sweater Song on long-defunct, highly influential UK alternative music TV show The Word (sidenote, I thought I had written about 'The Word' and my crush on Katie Puckrik in a previous article in the beforetimes, but if I did, I can't find it. Watch for more details when I talk about L7 and other riot girl bands). Then, at D's house I saw the music video for Buddy Holly where they do the whole inserting-themselves-into-Happy-Days thing. I can't remember how long after I got the album, but I had a lot of time for very early Weezer, before Rivers Cuomo revealed his true form. Say It Ain't So is the standout song and would be a karaoke favourite of mine if it weren't so high in one spot and also a massive bummer.
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Boston exists as one of those foundational albums you get passed along by your parents. I remember owning this on cassette tape, shortly after the Bee Gees/Pet Shop Boys initial set of albums I listened to on my walkman. The lead songwriter for Boston was also their drummer, which you can tell because every single song has amazingly driving drums which are incredibly fun to play along to. More Than A Feeling, their best known song, is about that lead songwriter being sad because he couldn't marry his cousin. So, pluses and minuses as a person, but this album is the primordial soup from which modern guitar music emerged. Worth your time.
I'm sure like me, everyone else innately links Seal and his debut album with playing Bards Tale II on their ZX Spectrum 128+. No? Just me? Another one for the cassette tape collection, and like Blur's self-titled album, another gift which accompanied a computer game, with both being linked in my brain in a way where its hard for me to hear Killer and not picture the blue-and-yellow loading bars of the Spectrum as it spent 4 minutes reading the code from tape so I could play this text adventure game. You kids don't know how good you have it. I think Seal has a great voice and the songs really suit it, I didn't mind listening to this album at all 30 years after it dominated my personal airwaves.
Heart comes from the same era as the two albums above (see how my mind works? its like an endless chain of completely pointless connections only I would make), as its another gift which I received on tape from my parents, perhaps in the hope that providing me with a combination of girls and rock music would act as some kind of formative counterweight to them buying me the Pet Shop Boys record. Honestly, I think the female-led Power Ballad is long overdue a return to fashion. If Looks Could Kill and These Dreams aren't quite as iconic as Barracuda, but they're more than serviceable rock songs on their own merits and the Wilson sisters give it some socks on the vocals. If you are a band, have women who can sing, and you're looking for a direction, go listen to Heart, and Pat Benetar, and Bonnie Tyler and Cyndi Lauper, add some modern influences, and bring the power ballad screaming back to prominence. I'll be here on the internet whenever you want to give me the credit for your fame and fortune.
And whatever you do, give your album a proper name.
