We're praying for rain
OK Go put out a new record this week called Of the Blue Colour of the Sky. This is much less of a big deal than Vampire Weekend releasing their second record on the same day, but in some ways the OK Go thing is more interesting to me, because it's rare that I've been able to observe a band's development from such an early stage. Marisa pointed out to me that we actually liked Vampire Weekend before their first album came out because they were on the winning CD Game entry in 2007, but even that felt sort of late to me, maybe because the L Magazine had been talking them up all year, so while the album came out in January 2008, the run-up and follow-up made it feel like it had been out for years -- I like Vampire Weekend, but it definitely felt like music other people liked, not music with a real sense of personal discovery on my part (that said, their new album is pretty fine). With OK Go, though, I feel uniquely positioned to write about them without centering it all around the music videos for which they're most famous. Seriously, every single review of the new album has led with YouTube.
I'm sure there are plenty of people in Chicago who can lay claim to knowing OK Go more or less from the beginning; I can only call firsties (really thirdsies, after Marisa and Michelle) because Marisa put a song of theirs on the first mix tape she ever made for me in the summer of 2001. That also marks one of the only times I've ever came up empty when looking a band up on Allmusic. Marisa and Michelle knew them because they opened for They Might Be Giants, which is how I became familiar with them later that year. They didn't have an album yet; just a couple of self-released EPs. There must have been heat on the band, though, because they were signed to Capitol and eventually released their self-titled first album in fall 2002; their second came out in summer 2005; and now their third, still for Capitol, is in stores. This has made their career a helpful, if often frustrating, portrait of life as a major-label rock band.
What I noticed about seeing OK Go live, apart from their energy and good humor which makes them a good match for TMBG (and makes their eventual video success logical), was a sort of cheerful strangeness -- a willingness to be noisy or silly or obtuse. When the album finally came out, although the appealingly strange "Hello My Treacherous Friends" and other oddball touches remained, some of that experimental edge was sanded down from their overall sound -- a little more Weezer than Pixies, more fun than really brilliant. One of the biggest impressions from the first record, especially as someone who had heard some of these songs live and in earlier forms, was the single and leadoff track "Get Over It," a post-glam hand-clappy anthem. It's a tremendously fun song, but when I first heard it, it felt strange to hear them go so big and broad, even as they carried it off with aplomb. But as a statement of pop-rock potential, that song and album were swell.
At their least inspired, the band has continued in the "Get Over It" vein lyrically, by which I mean naming songs after stock phrases ("Here It Goes Again," "Do What You Want," "A Good Idea at the Time") and trying to animate them with sheer exuberance -- plus some catchiness, too, but on the second record especially, a lot of that descends into repetition, and sometimes betrays the cleverness and weirdness of their earlier lyrics.
It's these missteps that make that second record, Oh No, a bit of a disappointment. When they mix up their styles, like the gentle "Oh Lately It's So Quiet," the rougher-edged "Invincible," the Pixies-ish "No Sign of Life," or the very first-album sounding "It's a Disaster," they continue to create infectious, somewhat offbeat rock and roll. But taken as a whole, the second album feels a little self-conscious, a term that's usually associated with trying to be quirky or arty, but in OK Go's case, for me, refers to their obvious desire for success.
I don't begrudge them that -- it was obvious to me, seeing them those first few times, that this is a band that could blow up to some degree -- but I do question their methodology. The band is inventive about promotion and dabbling and the cross-section of the two -- those self-conceived music videos, an association with This American Life, testifying to Congress about the music industry. But they do all of this from the vantage point of a major label contract, which I think (though I have no way of knowing for sure) imposes limitations even as they enjoy other freedoms.
Maybe that's why the first record (which admittedly, in retrospect, is pretty awesome) feels like the accessible version of a slightly smarter band. Maybe that's why Oh No, conceived with a Franz Ferdinand producer, seems slightly calculated, like an attempt to be a spazzier cousin to the new-wave-y dance-rock of Franz and the Bravery and other bands that were hot in 2004. Maybe that's why even a cool decision like hiring a longtime Flaming Lips producer to do the new record seems a bit more like a business move.
And -- I think most importantly -- maybe that's why Oh No nonetheless came out three years after its predecessor, and its follow-up took another four and a half: the major label philosophy seems to be based around milking the holy hell out of your product, not making a new album every year or two. You put out an album, you promote it relentlessly on TV and on tour, you tour some more, you re-release your album with bonus tracks or an extra DVD, and then you tour promoting that. You do not go back to the studio until it's likely that your product has sold every copy it can.
By signing with a major right away, OK Go sort of missed out on those first few years of being an indie band on an under-the-radar label, where you can put out a record every year for a few years. A lot of my favorite recent bands -- the Hold Steady, Rilo Kiley, the White Stripes, Sleater-Kinney -- released their first three albums in as little as three or four years, building their style and their audience. OK Go has taken eight, already moving at a sluggish mid-career pace -- yet despite the more corporate backing, I don't think they've sold nearly the number of records as some of their indie peers (I could be wrong about this; record sales stats are weirdly difficult to find).
Of the Colour of the Blue Sky seems cheerfully unlikely to follow their music videos into the mainstream, as it follows their more experimental side further than the previous two records -- it feels self-conscious, too, but in the more traditional sense of wanting to assert their artistry rather than continue to be known for a music video where they dance on treadmills. On a purely musical level, it's a pleasure to hear them stretch out again, not just banging on their powered up guitars with more or less distortion. At its best, they mix their senses of weirdness and fun on songs like the two-three punch of "This Too Shall Pass" and "All is Not Lost."
On those songs, the decision to open up their sound and play around with it feels like an outgrowth of their natural energy. Elsewhere, it sounds confident on the outside, a touch insecure on the inside. Even that cool decision to get Dave Fridmann to produce seems a little more opportunistic when you consider (as it took me several days to remember -- actually, Marisa reminded me) that he's also the MGMT producer. Actually, before I even remembered that, there were fleeting moments listening to the record that I thought of MGMT -- that spacey, noodling side that made me lose interest in them when I saw them open for Beck.
I like OK Go more than Franz Ferdinand or MGMT, so I'm especially sensitive about any sense that they're comfortable following in those bands' footsteps. Maybe Blue Sky just hits a few of my pet peeves, though, because I'm sorry, I really do not like Prince either, so hearing OK Go draw out songs like "Skyscrapers" with their minimalist-Prince groove and high-pitched vocals is a little wearying. "I Want You So Bad I Can't Breathe" feels like a lazier retreat of a first-album song like "You're So Damn Hot," which may not be any more nuanced, but feels more direct and concise. (Also, I miss backing vocals from Tim and company -- detectable on a few songs, but often buried or nonexistent.)
But as the album goes on, it shakes off some of its funk affectations and becomes genuinely eclectic again, including their most unplugged song ever ("Last Leaf"), the Flaming Lips-y "Back from Kathmandu," and a couple of pretty, languorous closers: "While You Were Asleep" and the semi-epic "In the Glass." That's the thing, though: either of those songs could close the album because several of the sonic shifts get two or three songs to play themselves out. If they had picked, say, just one or two Prince-y grooves and spacey digressions, and tightened the thirteen-song, fifty-minute sprawl into ten or eleven shorter songs and, while they were at it, included iTunes bonus track "Louisiana Land," Blue Sky might've been a blast, rather than a solid but uneven change of pace.
Is it presumptuous (or naive) to blame all that on major-label machinery? I notice this about many indie-ish nerd-ish acts I like with established footholds on major labels -- Weezer, Fountains of Wayne, Ben Folds, Liz Phair, even the Flaming Lips for a few years until their recent reweirdening: I find myself picking apart their records and saying, OK, well, if they cut this song, and brought in this B-side, or combined the best parts of these two albums into one album... then you'd have something really really good instead of pretty good or mildly disappointing.
I'm sure you could chalk it up to coincidence, or suppose that the major labels are less a cause of this than a symptom of the acts' lack of sure footing (or, if you were Pitchfork, you could just say that all of those acts except the Lips have sucked always or for ten years, whichever applies first). But when I hear a great OK Go song like "This Too Shall Pass" or "Invincible" or "Hello My Treacherous Friends," or see their delightful live shows, I hear and see potential that maybe shouldn't be shooting through the music industry pinball machine.
I'm sure there are plenty of people in Chicago who can lay claim to knowing OK Go more or less from the beginning; I can only call firsties (really thirdsies, after Marisa and Michelle) because Marisa put a song of theirs on the first mix tape she ever made for me in the summer of 2001. That also marks one of the only times I've ever came up empty when looking a band up on Allmusic. Marisa and Michelle knew them because they opened for They Might Be Giants, which is how I became familiar with them later that year. They didn't have an album yet; just a couple of self-released EPs. There must have been heat on the band, though, because they were signed to Capitol and eventually released their self-titled first album in fall 2002; their second came out in summer 2005; and now their third, still for Capitol, is in stores. This has made their career a helpful, if often frustrating, portrait of life as a major-label rock band.
What I noticed about seeing OK Go live, apart from their energy and good humor which makes them a good match for TMBG (and makes their eventual video success logical), was a sort of cheerful strangeness -- a willingness to be noisy or silly or obtuse. When the album finally came out, although the appealingly strange "Hello My Treacherous Friends" and other oddball touches remained, some of that experimental edge was sanded down from their overall sound -- a little more Weezer than Pixies, more fun than really brilliant. One of the biggest impressions from the first record, especially as someone who had heard some of these songs live and in earlier forms, was the single and leadoff track "Get Over It," a post-glam hand-clappy anthem. It's a tremendously fun song, but when I first heard it, it felt strange to hear them go so big and broad, even as they carried it off with aplomb. But as a statement of pop-rock potential, that song and album were swell.
At their least inspired, the band has continued in the "Get Over It" vein lyrically, by which I mean naming songs after stock phrases ("Here It Goes Again," "Do What You Want," "A Good Idea at the Time") and trying to animate them with sheer exuberance -- plus some catchiness, too, but on the second record especially, a lot of that descends into repetition, and sometimes betrays the cleverness and weirdness of their earlier lyrics.
It's these missteps that make that second record, Oh No, a bit of a disappointment. When they mix up their styles, like the gentle "Oh Lately It's So Quiet," the rougher-edged "Invincible," the Pixies-ish "No Sign of Life," or the very first-album sounding "It's a Disaster," they continue to create infectious, somewhat offbeat rock and roll. But taken as a whole, the second album feels a little self-conscious, a term that's usually associated with trying to be quirky or arty, but in OK Go's case, for me, refers to their obvious desire for success.
I don't begrudge them that -- it was obvious to me, seeing them those first few times, that this is a band that could blow up to some degree -- but I do question their methodology. The band is inventive about promotion and dabbling and the cross-section of the two -- those self-conceived music videos, an association with This American Life, testifying to Congress about the music industry. But they do all of this from the vantage point of a major label contract, which I think (though I have no way of knowing for sure) imposes limitations even as they enjoy other freedoms.
Maybe that's why the first record (which admittedly, in retrospect, is pretty awesome) feels like the accessible version of a slightly smarter band. Maybe that's why Oh No, conceived with a Franz Ferdinand producer, seems slightly calculated, like an attempt to be a spazzier cousin to the new-wave-y dance-rock of Franz and the Bravery and other bands that were hot in 2004. Maybe that's why even a cool decision like hiring a longtime Flaming Lips producer to do the new record seems a bit more like a business move.
And -- I think most importantly -- maybe that's why Oh No nonetheless came out three years after its predecessor, and its follow-up took another four and a half: the major label philosophy seems to be based around milking the holy hell out of your product, not making a new album every year or two. You put out an album, you promote it relentlessly on TV and on tour, you tour some more, you re-release your album with bonus tracks or an extra DVD, and then you tour promoting that. You do not go back to the studio until it's likely that your product has sold every copy it can.
By signing with a major right away, OK Go sort of missed out on those first few years of being an indie band on an under-the-radar label, where you can put out a record every year for a few years. A lot of my favorite recent bands -- the Hold Steady, Rilo Kiley, the White Stripes, Sleater-Kinney -- released their first three albums in as little as three or four years, building their style and their audience. OK Go has taken eight, already moving at a sluggish mid-career pace -- yet despite the more corporate backing, I don't think they've sold nearly the number of records as some of their indie peers (I could be wrong about this; record sales stats are weirdly difficult to find).
Of the Colour of the Blue Sky seems cheerfully unlikely to follow their music videos into the mainstream, as it follows their more experimental side further than the previous two records -- it feels self-conscious, too, but in the more traditional sense of wanting to assert their artistry rather than continue to be known for a music video where they dance on treadmills. On a purely musical level, it's a pleasure to hear them stretch out again, not just banging on their powered up guitars with more or less distortion. At its best, they mix their senses of weirdness and fun on songs like the two-three punch of "This Too Shall Pass" and "All is Not Lost."
On those songs, the decision to open up their sound and play around with it feels like an outgrowth of their natural energy. Elsewhere, it sounds confident on the outside, a touch insecure on the inside. Even that cool decision to get Dave Fridmann to produce seems a little more opportunistic when you consider (as it took me several days to remember -- actually, Marisa reminded me) that he's also the MGMT producer. Actually, before I even remembered that, there were fleeting moments listening to the record that I thought of MGMT -- that spacey, noodling side that made me lose interest in them when I saw them open for Beck.
I like OK Go more than Franz Ferdinand or MGMT, so I'm especially sensitive about any sense that they're comfortable following in those bands' footsteps. Maybe Blue Sky just hits a few of my pet peeves, though, because I'm sorry, I really do not like Prince either, so hearing OK Go draw out songs like "Skyscrapers" with their minimalist-Prince groove and high-pitched vocals is a little wearying. "I Want You So Bad I Can't Breathe" feels like a lazier retreat of a first-album song like "You're So Damn Hot," which may not be any more nuanced, but feels more direct and concise. (Also, I miss backing vocals from Tim and company -- detectable on a few songs, but often buried or nonexistent.)
But as the album goes on, it shakes off some of its funk affectations and becomes genuinely eclectic again, including their most unplugged song ever ("Last Leaf"), the Flaming Lips-y "Back from Kathmandu," and a couple of pretty, languorous closers: "While You Were Asleep" and the semi-epic "In the Glass." That's the thing, though: either of those songs could close the album because several of the sonic shifts get two or three songs to play themselves out. If they had picked, say, just one or two Prince-y grooves and spacey digressions, and tightened the thirteen-song, fifty-minute sprawl into ten or eleven shorter songs and, while they were at it, included iTunes bonus track "Louisiana Land," Blue Sky might've been a blast, rather than a solid but uneven change of pace.
Is it presumptuous (or naive) to blame all that on major-label machinery? I notice this about many indie-ish nerd-ish acts I like with established footholds on major labels -- Weezer, Fountains of Wayne, Ben Folds, Liz Phair, even the Flaming Lips for a few years until their recent reweirdening: I find myself picking apart their records and saying, OK, well, if they cut this song, and brought in this B-side, or combined the best parts of these two albums into one album... then you'd have something really really good instead of pretty good or mildly disappointing.
I'm sure you could chalk it up to coincidence, or suppose that the major labels are less a cause of this than a symptom of the acts' lack of sure footing (or, if you were Pitchfork, you could just say that all of those acts except the Lips have sucked always or for ten years, whichever applies first). But when I hear a great OK Go song like "This Too Shall Pass" or "Invincible" or "Hello My Treacherous Friends," or see their delightful live shows, I hear and see potential that maybe shouldn't be shooting through the music industry pinball machine.