Plumbiferous Media

OneRe­pub­lic (yes, with­out the space) has been active since 2002, but only pro­duced its first album in 2007. Since then, it has released numer­ous sin­gles, and most recently, its sopho­more album. Wak­ing Up is best described as a mix of indie, some rock, and a healthy por­tion of pop. But while the three gen­res are eas­ily among the sim­plest to com­bine, some­thing clearly went awry with Wak­ing Up.

Wak­ing Up starts weakly, and quickly begins to worsen from that point. The open­ing track, “Made for You,” com­bines what could have been an inter­est­ing drum rhythm paired with decently orig­i­nal chords, but the choice of piano for the main instru­men­tal voice was sim­ply a mis­take. The piano fits nei­ther with the vocals nor the drums, and each addi­tional instru­ment that enters fits no bet­ter. In fact, the instru­men­tals don’t quite fit together on the sec­ond track either, with an organ play­ing along­side an extremely heavy drum beat (another char­ac­ter­is­tic of the album), nor the third, or really, any of the tracks.

But it is the later tracks such as “Good Life” that really make the lis­tener won­der how such odd instru­men­ta­tions and musi­cal deci­sions can sound so utterly generic and bor­ing. The answer, of course, is that nearly all the tracks of Wak­ing Up effec­tively use ran­dom instru­ments that don’t really fit together play­ing gen­er­ally unin­ter­est­ing har­monies over an extremely loud drum line to a generic poppy melody. And sure, the tracks are rel­a­tively diverse, but that’s not par­tic­u­larly dif­fi­cult when instru­ments are cho­sen seem­ingly at random.

There is noth­ing harsh, sharp, or even vaguely inter­est­ing about Ryan Tedder’s vocals. Instead, they’ve been processed and pro­duced to be as palat­able as humanly pos­si­ble. They’re left com­pletely sou­less - at sev­eral points on Wak­ing Up, it is com­pletely believ­able that a com­puter could have taken over for Ted­der with no effect what­so­ever on the vocals. Occa­sional bits of vocal flair - the short quasi-rap seg­ment on “Secrets,” var­i­ous shrieks, and attempts at some sort of stunted cre­ativ­ity - fall flat. By the end of the album (or rather the end of the first track), Tedder’s vocals have become tedious sim­ply by existing.

Wak­ing Up is admit­tedly not the sort of music that’s meant to stand up to any sort of deep lis­ten­ing. Nev­er­the­less, when the lyrics of an album are alter­nately so generic and so irri­tat­ing that they stand out in spite of being unim­por­tant to the music, it is by no means a good thing. Wak­ing Up falls soundly into this cat­e­gory. Between inces­sant rep­e­ti­tion (“Every­body loves me!” “This is gonna be a good life!”) and mostly use­less cho­ruses, Ted­der finds time to sing the truly awful parts of the album, includ­ing the inanely arro­gant “And every­day I see the news / All the prob­lems that we could solve them / When a sit­u­a­tion rises just write it into an album” from “Secrets.” But Tedder’s favorite pas­time on Wak­ing Up seems to be talk­ing about him­self. The obvi­ous exam­ple is, of course, “Every­body Loves Me,” but the major­ity of the album is speck­led with Tedder’s attempts at musi­cal self-aggrandizement. It, need­less to say, does not come off well.

In the end, Wak­ing Up seems to be lit­tle more than an elab­o­rate mas­sag­ing of Ryan Tedder’s ego. It’s not cre­ative musi­cally, lyri­cally, or in any other notable man­ner. It doesn’t stand out among pop or rock music, and worse, it doesn’t even stand out against itself. There are very few notable moments on Wak­ing Up, and what moments exist are gen­er­ally notable for being worse than their imme­di­ate sur­round­ings. Wak­ing Up only has merit (barely) as the sort of music that floats by unno­ticed on a soft-rock radio sta­tion - but more than a minute or two, and you’ll want to change the track in favor of some­thing with a bit more substance.

This post is tagged 10-19, OneRepublic