Marcy Playground: Classic or dud?

Set aside "Sex and Candy." Just forget about its tired ass completely for a second and listen to the eponymous album from which it was plucked. This is a really nice little album! Weird, inward-turned songs of a nerdy loner ("St. Joe On The Schoolbus") who can't quite manage existential despair and would really rather just be left alone to enjoy his Dungeons & Dragons games (see "A Cloak of Elvenkind"). There's a bit of grownup anguish ("Opium") but really he's just trying to get his childhood playmates to come back ("Sherry Fraser," probably the highlight). Throw in a few kind of pointless (but energetic!) story-songs - including "Poppies" with a riff so good you can't believe nobody thought of it until Marcy fucking Playground - and you've got a set better than anything you'd see at any open-mic you'd expect a band like this to be playing.

Like Bicycle's Bicycle, which I also just started a thread about, the Marcy Playground record is a hard thing to accept if you have a blanket distaste for late 90s production cliches; this time the roadblock is that acoustic-guitar sound that wants to be "organic" but somehow sounds a little too labored-over. But as with the Bicycle album, if you can get past all that, there's a very nice collection of songs to be had.

Oh, and "Sex and Candy," which is ungodly annoying and I really don't even want to discuss or think about ever again in my life.