This weekend I was forced to go back and reload every song from my iTunes and place them onto my new hard drive. It wasn’t until after cracking open my laptop, replacing the hard drive, and installing the new operating system that I realized that some technical difficulties remained.

I noticed that some of my music was not present in the iTunes folder from my old hard drive, as well as all playlists, play count, and song ratings that I had tediously assigned were all deleted (the importance of physical copies of music sounds like a good future blog topic…).

I decided to take it upon myself to go through my entire library and meticulously delete things like incomplete albums and songs that were less than legally obtained. It was in doing this that I rediscovered the charm that is Let’s Face It.

In the spring of my first year at Illinois State I branched out past Watterson and the quad and wandered through uptown Normal and into the variety of shops there. It was the first or many times that I would step foot into Waiting Room Records.

I walked away with two purchases; a little, white, paperback book without author or title that I haven’t had the pleasure of completing yet (but it’s a great, captivating story from what I remember) and the Mighty Mighty Bosstones’ fifth studio album.

The reason I picked it up? I had less than $10 to spend and the book and CD amounted to about $7. If I remember correctly there were multiple copies of Let’s Face It, each one being sold for just $1. Because of that price and the incredible quality of this album this may be one of the best purchases in my travels within the world of used music, cementing a position in my favorite albums of all time.
    
    It took a few years for Let’s Face It to sink in to my mind as a great album. My younger self hadn’t yet come to fully appreciated ska, having just discovered it a few months prior. I got the CD for the single, The Impression That I Get, as did everyone else in 1997 when the CD was released. It peaked at number 1 on the Billboard 200 and the album reached 27, the highest chart position for the Bosstones. The Impression That I Get is an incredible song that I still become obsessed with every now and then but is not the only worthwhile track on the album.

The album starts off with Noise Brigade and Rascal King before slowing down to Royal Oil, a smooth, agreeable ska track chock full of upstroke on guitar and subtle use of horns.

After The Impression That I Get (my anthem through all of last year), things march on with the title track and That Bug Bit Me before being calmed by Another Drinkin’ Song. Numbered Days, Break So Easy, Nevermind Me, Desensitized, and 1-2-8, wrap things up on the album, providing the listener with a variety of hard-hitting distortion, enthusiastic walking bass lines, gritty vocals, all paired up with crisp notes from the horns.

This entire album has solidified such a prominent position in my musical life that I forgot that I had picked it up used for only a dollar. I wanted to make sure that I mentioned by name every single track on the album in my review as not to single out anything from the CD. The entire album is a flawless, extraordinary authority in the genre of third-wave ska.

Only a few months after Let’s Face It was released, ska music would become unheard in popular music, being reduced to thirty second music snippets in commercials and theme songs on television.

For those of us still gripping on to the fragments of the genre that remain (The Mighty Mighty Bosstones are still an active, touring band and there are plenty of other ska bands who continue to do their thing), Let’s Face It is well worth a purchase, whether used, new, MP3, vinyl, what have you.

If you don’t already own this album (or if you’re interested in researching ska and aren’t sure where to start), this is a staple album for third-wave ska and should be in every ska-kid’s musical library.