YMMV / Blue October

---

• Awesome Music: Just about everything on the Foiled album, particularly "X Amount of Words" and "Into the Ocean".
• Broken Base: A standout example. Some fans were not happy (and remain unhappy to this day) with Foiled, which was a musical and production shift from their first three albums. Yet Foiled made the band famous. Compare fans of Metallica's 1980s work who remain upset to this day over the Black Album.
• Crack Pairing: Furstenfeld has a duet with Tarja Turunen, a soprano singer from Finland, on "Medusa", the closing song of Tarja's album "Colours In The Dark".
• It's Popular, Now It Sucks!: Perhaps explain the first Hype Backlash they got within their own fandom after the surprise success of Foiled, though others would note while the production was more polished on that record it still very much continued the genre-fusing alt-rock feel and Furstfield's trademark darkly earnest lyrical style that made them cult favorites in the first place.
• Narm: "The Flight" is a Tear Jerker, but then the chorus comes in, and well... it's not.
  • Given this is what many detractors accuse the band of being full of, though to the contrary fans would often argue the music is just unusually upfront yet sentimental (at times) in a much more irony-friendly musical landscape.
• Nightmare Fuel: At least one song on each album contains this, but "The End," the last track on Approaching Normal, is a Trope Codifier. The song is sung from the vantage point of a jilted husband, who creeps up to the doorstep of his own house, and sees his wife (or possibly ex-wife) having sex with another man. The upset husband breaks into his own house, and kills the man, the wife, and himself in succession.
• Signature Song: "Hate Me"
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Any Man In America features Justin rapping, in high contrast to their previous work which mixed mid-tempo rock songs and ballads. This is likely to divide fans.
• Tough Act to Follow: Expectations were considerably higher for the band after Foiled, which may explain the less-than-stellar reception Approaching Normal got, though it did well commercially and remains liked by fans if rarely cited as a personal favorite.

---