or better or worse, we here at Stylus, in all of our autocratic consumer-crit greed, are slaves to timeliness. A record over six months old is often discarded, deemed too old for publication, a relic in the internet age. That's why each week at Stylus, one writer takes a look at an album with the benefit of time. Whether it has been unjustly ignored, unfairly lauded, or misunderstood in some fundamental way, we aim with On Second Thought to provide a fresh look at albums that need it.

In the epic motion picture Gone With The Wind the main character and heroine of the story, Scarlett O'Hara, obsesses over a man named Ashley Wilkes. The dream man happens to be married and throughout the story Scarlett engages in relationships with other men while yearning for her beloved Ashley. At the end, when Ashley finally is free and she has the chance to unite with him, she realizes he's not what she wants. She had created an image for herself that she now found inaccurate and undesirable.

Martin Carr, songwriter and guitarist of The Boo Radleys, had that same passion for success for many years. He wanted full fledged success. He wanted a hit album. True, for a band of their genre they had achieved considerable success in 1993 with their album Giant Steps. They experienced indie stardom and won several awards that won them accolades within the independent community that year. Martin, however, dreamt of bigger and better. He put his mind to the task and came up with Wake Up!, an album coupled with its delightfully joyous offspring Wake Up Boo! that became a hit all across Europe.

Faced with what he always wanted, Carr came to the conclusion that this was not the stuff dreams were made of. He soon tired of fame and media recognition. So when the band started working on their next album C'mon Kids, Carr started writing from the heart, without an agenda. The result was deemed difficult and unapproachable and some of the members of the press even suggested that Martin wrote songs with the specific wish to alienate the fans that had started supporting the band because of their more radio friendly sound. Whether they did or not, Martin until this day claims it was not a deliberate move.

It is to this backdrop that the next album came along. Kingsize was the fifth edition of the Martin Carr diaries ever released. And because of the commercial failure of C'mon Kids, perhaps also their most neglected affair. Not because there is a shortage of quality or brilliance on Kingsize. Quite the contrary.

Indeed, it is a fantastic album. It is a plethora of all types of pop and rock. If you wanted to create a prototype of a masterpiece then you could very well recreate Kingsize. Containing a broad range of styles, it serves any musical need aside from hard rock and country music.

Throughout their career The Boo Radleys had a tendency of writing uplifting melodies. It often even eclipsed a lot of the melancholic lyrics and downright depressing songwriting. Kingsize, the band's last album, was by no means an exception. Songs like "Heaven's At The Bottom Of This Glass", "High As Monkeys", "Jimmy Webb Is God" and "The Future Is Now" all sound happy and cheerful, that is if you disregard the lyrics. Do not let that fool you, though. Lyrically, the album exposes a tired, sad man who has had enough with everything, who feels insecure every moment his beloved leaves his side, who considers the government a force working against the people, and who merely wants to remember the old days instead of living in the present. Maybe it's true as he says in "The Old Newsstand At Hamilton Square": 'sad songs are easier to play...'. Most times, amongst the despair, there is some hope, there is the need to fight and carry on and damn the ones who are too cynical to care '...come together, love each other, spit on those who say, this is not the way...'.

Generally, although most songs have a personal angle on bigger issues, it's a socially conscious album. There's a song about Philip Morris and his empire in "Monuments For A Dead Century" (a song Martin wrote after a trip to Morocco to find himself), irony and criticism of his own drinking in "Heaven's At The Bottom Of This Glass", and "Free Huey" seeks redemption for a Black Panther member. Along with this melancholy and constant criticism of others and himself, there is love, happiness, and hope for the future found within songs like "She Is Everywhere", "Jimmy Webb Is God", and "The Future Is Now”. Lying beneath “The Future IS Now”, however, is a critical eye that looks forward with hope as much as it looks forward with foreboding. Kingsize has a little bit of every part of life in it. Unfortunately, it came to be the band's last album and has, thus far, been criminally underrated.

Carr has later declared that the period of writing and recording Kingsize was one of the saddest of his life. By the spring of 2001 he still had never listened to the album because of the memories he feared it would bring. He told me personally, however, that he may go ahead and listen to it soon- the little he has heard he termed “good”.