43. No Good For No One Now – Owen (2002)

Owen at first struck me as a fine hybrid of Bright Eyes and Dashboard Confessional, in that Mike Kinsella’s heartache and complaints felt respectively drunken and, well, childish. That No Good For No One Now was recorded in the old bedroom of his mother’s house should further incriminate this adolescence. But damned if we all can’t relate to his growing pains – the breakups, hook-ups and subsequent regrets – which are sung in his always-conversational delivery and warm guitar tones.

All things considered, it’s likely that 2009’s New Leaves is Kinsella’s best release but No Good For No One Now is where I hitched my wagon to Owen’s sweetly depressed spiral toward suburbia. And it has lost none of its emotion.