About five years ago, in one of my
iTunes running diaries, I touched upon a British big beat techno band
called The Propellerheads and lamented that they had never released a follow-up
to their 1998 debut, Decksandrumsandrockandroll.
Unfortunately, the band has still not come out with a proper follow-up.
Unlike some other bands, there isn’t a really good
indication online for what the issue is. Since 1998, they’ve released one new
song according to Wikipedia – “Ten Years (Johnston’s Strut Part One),” which
was a single track for a compilation in 2003, and is so obscure it’s not even
on YouTube. The band’s debut peaked at No. 6 in the UK, and went gold, so it’s
odd that there was no second album. They’re one of the ultimate “you’ve heard
them, even if you’ve never heard OF them,” thanks to their appearances on The Matrix soundtrack and other spy stuff. “History Repeating” with
Shirley Bassey was their one U.S. radio hit.
This got me thinking about some other One Album Wonders (in
contrast to One Hit Wonders) floating about in my iTunes collection. From that
same blog post, there is New Radicals. Their front man, Gregg Alexander, was
strongly anti-corporate and odd, and the band self-destructed as a result. They
have one album, the wonderfully-named Maybe
You’ve Been Brainwashed Too, and they’re best known for the earworm “You Get What You Give.”
The
Postal Service was a side project of the guys from Death Cab for Cutie and
other stuff. Unlike the first two bands mentioned, they actually did claim for
years to be working on a second album to follow up Give Up. However, it never materialized between 2007 and 2012. The
band then got back together for some shows in 2013, and disbanded again. How
frustrating! (Also, this is somehow the first time I’ve written about The
Postal Service, even though they were basically my soundtrack for sophomore to
senior years of college. I was probably just burnt out on them for a couple
years after…)
There is also the case of the Weezer side project Homie, which didn’t
even get to one-album status. They had a single song, “American Girls,” that
was awesome and on a movie soundtrack. (Meet The Deedles,
a horrible Disney movie that attempted to hijack surf culture and starred Paul
Walker.) “American Girls”
is peak-Rivers Cuomo, and Homie also featured members of Cake and Soul
Coughing. Apparently, there are live performance bootlegs out there, but I
haven’t listened to them… yet. (One other “incredible soundtrack song” from the
1990s is “JAR” by
Green Day, which was initially only available on the soundtrack for the
otherwise forgettable Angus, but has
since made its way on to some other Green Day releases.)
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