Released: 1995
After Melody Maker named Suede "the best new band in Britain" before they'd even released a single, they tried something similar with Menswe@r, putting them too on the cover before they put anything out. With slightly less success.
Menswe@r arrived on a wave of hype, something that soon waived, before turning to ridicule, eventually leaving them as one of the Britpop bands critics pointed out as being something of a joke and one of the reasons why Britpop was a load of shit.
The music itself is fairly straight forward indie rock, with a slightly harder edge on one or two songs, and the obligatory string-laden ballad ('Being Brave') designed for commercial radio play.
The band's first three singles, 'I'll Manage Somehow', 'Daydreamer' and 'Stardust' are actually pretty good and are by some way the best songs on the album. The rest of the songs on the album vary from average to terrible, not helped by some muddy production and quite poor singing.
While their reputation as something of a joke is not really deserved (there were far worse bands and albums at the time), it's hard to understand how they got so hyped in the first place. Their page on Wikipedia suggests that the band was formed on the back of a fabricated story about the as-yet unformed band, though I don't know how true that is.
Overall, this is a fairly run-of-the-mill album, not terrible, but not particularly memorable. The band would go on to record a second album ("Hay Tiempo") that was only released in Japan and was never released in the UK.
Rating: 2/5
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