I posted a link to an unaccompanied, unreleased vocal track by Smashmouth about a week ago, noting how spectacularly god-awful it was. It got a little attention from BoingBoing and a few other blogs … and as you might imagine, the comments just came rolling in. Many of them more or less agreed with this guy, who said

How is this humorous or worthy of posting? This is a raw, dry vocal track (obviously through a quality pre and with compression applied). There is no music and no discernible reverb applied to the vocal. It seems most of the negative commentary on this comes from folks who have no experience in the audio field, or comes from people with little experience with music production.

True. Very true. However. I have no experience in the stand-up comedy field, and little to no experience in stage production — but I stand by the fact that Gallagher sucks, no matter how well-crafted his props are.

Admittedly, the track was unreleased, just left to lie there in the studio. And if someone took a page out of one of my notebooks, scanned it, posted it and laughed at it I wouldn’t be too thrilled. But if I had a couple smash hits under my belt, millions in the bank, money for nothing and chicks for free, I’d probably shake the insult off pretty quick.

A couple folks got in the act, too, and actually made and posted mashups of the track! I couldn’t be more thrilled, frankly. Web 2.0 — it lets so many strangers strewn about the country, throughout time, lift our voices in a brilliant, unique harmony. Or in this case, burp the entire alphabet.

Check out the mashups, though:

From Chris at Agents and Reactants: Terrible Smashmouth Electro Mashup

From Jimbo, who says

… his vocals reminded me a little of trent reznor so i took a recent NIN remix and added Steve Harwell’s vocals on top, made a purdy nice mashup …

Nine Inch Mouth

If anyone else has got one, I’d love to hear it …

I used to think that any band who had any sort of fame has to be somebody’s favorite, just to amass the band’s base enough to push them onto the charts.

Not Smashmouth. Admittedly, I’m a bit of a music snob, but I’ve never met a SINGLE person who’s ever said “You know who really rocks me? Smashmouth.” Maybe those folks are out there, somewhere …

Smashmouth’s popularity is one of life’s great mysteries — like the popularity of “Two and a Half Men.” They have this kind of lukewarm appeal — the kind of appeal that stops me from changing the channel on a Clear-Channel-choked car radio while driving to the down-at-the-mouth outlet store when I’m visiting my parents.

Smashmouth is the music version of the best t-shirt at Hot Topic, the best of a rotten lot when choice is utterly not an option.

But this track, it’s something else entirely. It’s the singer’s isolated vocal track from the song “Days Like These” … and if you thought the band in aggregate was craptacular, this little gem is a white dwarf of sheer sub-par suck-rock.

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