Dressed Up as Life by Sick Puppies

Dressed Up as Life, released through Virgin on 3 April 2007, is the second album from Sydney's Sick Puppies and the first to reach American shops. The band Shimon Moore and Emma Anzai started in 1997 had spent 2006 riding a strange wave: "All the Same" had become the soundtrack to the Free Hugs Campaign and racked up tens of millions of views, and suddenly the world was listening.

That song anchors the record, a brooding, slow-building rocker. Around it, Moore sings and plays guitar, Anzai holds down the bass and Mark Goodwin, who had replaced Chris Mileski in 2003, makes his first album appearance on drums, with Rock Mafia producing it to a gleaming post-grunge sheen. It only scraped to number 181 on the Billboard 200, but it was the door opening.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.