Plumbiferous Media

Heav­ily hyped indie duo She & Him, com­posed of actress Zooey Deschanel and musi­cian M. Ward, released its sec­ond album, Vol­ume Two, which (unsur­pris­ingly) fol­lows its 2008 debut Vol­ume One. Hype aside, how­ever, Vol­ume Two is, at its best, lit­tle more than a strik­ingly banal indi­ca­tor that the pur­pose of She and Him is aimed more towards reviv­ing the most cloy­ingly cheer­ful soft rock from the his­tory of the genre than writ­ing gen­uinely cre­ative music, and at its worst, awful.

From a purely tech­ni­cal stand­point, while there is some musi­cal rep­e­ti­tion (thought not nearly as much as lyri­cal), Vol­ume Two does not have many prob­lems. Everything’s mostly in tune, noth­ing is too jar­ring, and indi­vid­ual lines are cer­tainly not bor­ing. Unfor­tu­nately, that’s about the best that can be said about Vol­ume Two. Some tracks are overly sim­i­lar musi­cally, everything’s overly sim­i­lar the­mat­i­cally, and when it’s not just plain irri­tat­ing, it’s just plain bor­ing. There are the few very lim­ited, truly inter­est­ing sec­tions, includ­ing about half of “Home” (the track con­tin­u­ally mod­u­lates into inter­est­ing minor mini-sections, only to spring back out into the cheer­i­ness that is the entire rest of the album), but that’s quite hon­estly about all the album has to offer.

As with Vol­ume One, Deschanel pro­vides vocals for Vol­ume Two. The best that can be said of this is that her voice fits quite well with the inces­santly effer­ves­cent tone of the music. The rest, unfor­tu­nately, doesn’t come out quite so well. It’s not that Deschanel can’t sing. Instead, it’s that she can­not seem to stop being so damn cheer­ful. Every line of Vol­ume Two seems to be infused with an infu­ri­at­ingly vacant glee that does less to lend emo­tion to the album than it does to make every moment indis­tin­guish­able from the rest. Cheer­ful music isn’t nec­es­sar­ily a bad thing - but when an album has been so obvi­ously packed with painfully inane whimsy, as Vol­ume Two has, it is.

Vol­ume Two is com­posed of eleven orig­i­nal songs and two cov­ers, each of which some­how man­ages to be just as repet­i­tive and obnox­iously insipid as the last. Essen­tially - when the deep­est, most thought-provoking line an album con­tains is “I could be sweet / And I could be sweeter,” either some­thing has gone badly wrong in the writ­ing process or the album was never meant to stand up to scrutiny any deeper than a read­ing of the track titles. In that spirit, Vol­ume Two is com­posed of emo­tion­ally stilted love songs, the occa­sional mediocre metaphor, and as much rep­e­ti­tion as an album can hold.

The real prob­lem with the cheery vapid­ness that con­sumes Vol­ume Two is just that - it con­sumes the album. While many albums get away with tracks that pur­pose­fully sound intel­lec­tu­ally empty, in order to achieve a spe­cific effect, if the whole album is sim­ply empty of any­thing other than pure light­head­ed­ness, you’re left with the feel­ing that no amount of thought actu­ally went into mak­ing the album. There are hap­pier albums than Vol­ume Two, there are more cre­ative albums than Vol­ume Two, there are more stim­u­lat­ing albums, and really, there are just bet­ter albums than Vol­ume Two.

This post is tagged 20-29, She & Him