[rayword45]

Day 66: Native by OneRepublic (Album Choice: Jonathan V.)

This has been a pretty bad day. Not the worst day ever, but a wholly dissatisfying, mood depleting, sanity testing day, loaded with condescending jerks, broken hardware, unnecessary work and all that jazz. I'm bushed, but wanted to take advantage of my sulky mood, so I thought let's handpick an angry sounding album.

That right there was an intro paragraph I wrote on Thursday night before deciding "fuck it, I should sleep instead". Now I'm no longer in a pissy mood but instead a completely phlegmatic one, so I'm gonna go with random.org.

I wish I was in a pissy mood again.

Well, actually I didn't have much reason to wish that, because this album reflects my mood, and my life. Boring. I wasn't exactly expecting the Devil's torture here, but my complete indifference to this music is so that I started listening and completely forgot I was listening until I was at track 6, Light It Up. And I only remembered because that song has the first electric guitar on the album, and the first guitar solo (which makes Cinnamon Girl damn near sound like the work of John Petrucci). Up till then I heard what sounded like folk-pop, electropop, wannabeindie pop, tribal drums, hip-hop beats and old people soft rock. All done as bland as possible.

Lucky that the unimpressive guitar playing knocked me back into attention mode, because Can't Stop is actually pretty good, with its heavy percussion and stronger-than-before vocals. The falsetto may grate on you a little bit but you can't deny that the vocal performance is the best thus far. Can't say the same about following tracks Au Revoir or Burning Bridges, which both just come off as cheesy and over orchestrated.

This whole album features many little touches that make me think they were going for a chant/singalong vibe (handclaps, heys, group choruses) but honestly this music is too placid and airy to evoke any sort of excitement to work like that. At best, this is completely inoffensive pop which acts as nice background noise if you like that sorta thing. At worst, this is completely inoffensive pop which you wouldn't listen to as background noise because you don't like this kinda music and/or prefer many of the other artists out there that make more interesting music.

So, in conclusion, and my ELA teachers always tell me "in conclusion" is a crappy start to a concluding paragraph, eeeeeeeeehhhhhhhhhhhhh...

Best Track: Can't Stop (though I should mention final track Don't Look Down as a good runner-up)
Rating: 4/10