| Deluxe | 1995 |
| Friction, Baby | 1996 |
| How Does Your Garden Grow | 1998 |
One of the many alternative bands that emerged in the mid-90s that enjoyed brief success with one or two significant radio hits, Better Than Ezra had their moment in the spotlight with Deluxe, an album that spawned the hits "Good" and "In The Blood" and had a somewhat Southern rock influence outside the indie rock tendencies of those first two tracks, which makes sense, because the band is from Louisiana.
Their next couple of albums, Friction, Baby and How Does Your Garden Grow? were mostly ignored ones, so it seems the band now dwells in relatively obscure status at this point.
--Nick Karn
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(reviewed by Nick Karn)
Better Than Ezra's debut is basically your typical alternative rock song collection, which starts off with two strong hit singles, "In The Blood" (a furious opening cut dealing with family relationships) and "Good" (whose melody is actually built on distortion) that are fairly unrepresentative of the rest of the album. Most of the other tracks are immersed in a Southern rock influence, which actually doesn't appear to be their strength, so they're not pulled off as effectively - tracks like "Coyote", "Southern Girl", and "Cry In The Sun" seem like little more than filler tunes.
The ballads are fairly high quality, though - the strings and dramatic solo section of "The Killer Inside" and the moving, mostly acoustic "This Time Of Year" are undoubtedly the major highlights here. There's also a bit of lyrical sarcasm apparent in a tongue-in-cheek commentary on youth in "Teenager", and even a bit of experimentation in the brief, untitled instrumental cut. All in all, Deluxe is a fairly good start and is a bit better than a normal alternative debut, but it sounds like an easily forgotten one nonetheless.
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(reviewed by Philip Maddox)
This album was a big disappointment after Ezra's first album, Deluxe. Though that album wasn't great, it did have some pretty good songs on it. It also had a neat Southern sound through it, which combined with the normal modern alternative sound made for an interesting listen. This record is completely different, though. The Southern roots are completely gone on this record. Instead, Ezra just sounds like every other alternative band out there. I wasn't planning on buying this at first, but I heard "King of New Orleans" on the radio, which was pretty catchy. I saw a copy once for cheap, so I got it. I hope you liked "King of New Orleans", 'cuz nothing else comes close. None of the songs are truly terrible - nothing that truly hurts you to listen to. However, I listened to this album about ten times and can remember about 4 songs on it out of 13. Not a very impressive count. Actually, the last song on here isn't bad - It's an instrumental called "At Ch. Degaulle, etc.". I have no idea what that means, but the fact remains that it's the best song on here by far - it's got a cool guitar riff with a jazzy piano backing. The rest is just passable background music.
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