It’s February Already?!?

Yeah, we know: it’s been February for a few days now. But we here at Rhino try to catch up on our beauty sleep over the weekend and do a bit of recharging, so, frankly, we were a little shocked when we rolled over this morning and suddenly realized we’d left January behind way back on Friday.

To celebrate the fact that 2014 is already one-twelfth over (or, if you prefer percentages to fractions, that it’s about 8.3% complete), we’d initially planned to entertain ourselves by serving up the closing track to Jesus Jones’s fourth album, 1997’s Already, which is a little ditty called – you guessed it – “February.”

While we were putting together this post, though, it suddenly occurred to us that many people may not even realize that Jesus Jones had a fourth album.

(In fact, they have a fifth album as well – 2001’s London – but that’s a story for another time.)

If you don’t know about Already, well, we can kind of understand that: when it was released in 1997, it only just skirted the UK charts – it topped out at #161 – and when it got a belated US release several months later, it didn’t chart at all. Still, it did have two minor UK hit singles, courtesy of “The Next Big Thing” (#49) and “Chemical No. 1” (#71), and despite its limited commercial success, Mike Edwards discussed the album in an email interview with the website HeadCleaner and said, “I think of it as being the most consistent album, the one with the best songs.”

So, wait, does that mean we have a lost classic on our hands?

Well, granted, Edwards made his comment about Already while he was in the midst of promoting the album, but as he continues to cite two of the album’s songs – “Rails” and “Wishing It Away” – among his all-time favorite Jesus Jones songs in his bio on the band’s website, it seems like he must still think it’s pretty decent. But we’ll let you make your own decision. (“Gee, thanks, Rhino!”)

So give it a listen, see how it sounds to you, then drop down to the Comments section and commit your thoughts on the matter to posterity. That way, when future generations of music fans rise up and demand to know where Already stands in the ranking of the Jesus Jones discography, you’ll be able to sleep soundly, knowing that your position has been well-documented.