Barenaked Ladies

The Ladies are Barenaked and prolific: Are Men is the companion disc to the Canadian stalwarts' Are Me, released only a few months earlier. Though it gets off to a slow opening and melts into mediocrity at the end, the middle of the album is fully stacked with BnL goodness. The horn-driven swinger "Angry People" is a sunshiney slice of '70s radio-pop perfection, which is what "Running Out of Ink" starts off as before veering into full-blown operatic torch song. Barenaked Ladies are never short on ideas, but they have a hard time shutting them off.