I'm
not exactly a huge pop fan, but I figured I would give this one a go
anyway, mostly because I was browsing and came across a couple of
cool album covers. 'Send My Love to the Dancefloor, I'll See You in
Hell (Hey Mister DJ)' is, if I am interpreting these incredibly dense
lyrics correctly, about how dancing is pretty fun, only done,
shockingly, in Top 40 pop-hits style. I like to think I'm relatively
open minded about music (which probably means that I'm the complete
opposite), but that one was pretty rough. If you've ever listened to
Fallout Boy or Panic! At the Disco, both good groups that I
personally don't happen to be into, you get an idea of what's going
on here. It's not bad, it would do the album a disservice to say so,
but it's not particularly good, either. Embarassingly, the only song
here that I kind of enjoyed was 'Bring It (Snakes on a Plane)'. I
will never, ever type that sentence again. While the themes are a bit
overdone (pretty much all of the songs here are about partying
dancing, and relationships - though I'm a fan of rap music, so I
guess I can't really harp too much on that matter), at least the
lyrics contain more than seven different words, a quality which I
cannot emphasize enough. Even the shittiest song can be made decent
with a little variety and though to the subject at hand. In addition,
while I don't like much of the genre as a whole, I'm a huge fan of
using live instrumentation (whether truly live or produced by a
computer) over synthesized pop beats, and the music here is well done
in that regard, providing a mix of the two, but skewed a little more
toward the former rather than the latter. Lyrics aside (“You
can put your hands up/I love girls with Brooklyn haircuts/I'll be
you're fanclub/Step, step/You're too slow/Speed it up”? What is
that? Or how about this one: “Diamond girl,/I wanna wrap you around
the world/I'll never let you touch the ground/I'll be your Biggie,
you'll be my Lil' Kim” It's like they're trying overly hard to
incorporate deep-sounding lyrics at the expense of content),
the music is just varied enough for me to tell when the track
changes, but not enough to make them completely distinct from one
another. This is great if it gets cut up into singles, but makes
listening to an album from start to finish a bit of a pain, not to
mention the creative issues involved. Despite all of the negativity,
I didn't hate this album, but I didn't particularly like it, either.
To rather cynically sum it up: it's hipster music that hipsters would
reject. Interpret that how you will.
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