Review: OK Go - Of The Blue Colour Of The Sky

It usually doesn't bode well when one of your music videos becomes more popular than you or your band ever will be. Thus is the case for Chicago's OK Go. When the band's only hit "Here It Goes Again" became the biggest novelty video this side of Weezer's "Pork and Beans" the band was forever doomed to one hit wonderdom. I suppose every band feels they have to justify their existence at one point in their career - enter the band's third album Of the Blue Colour of the Sky.

There are 4 kinds of bands. Bands who age gracefully (U2), bands who reinvent themselves (Radiohead), bands who tend to remain the same yet never come off as static or bland (The White Stripes) and bands who fall apart when faced with the prospect of thinking outside the box (the majority of bands around today). I bet ya can't guess where OK Go fall in line.

Blue Colour is a strange arrangement of half-assed attempts to write songs paired with a terrible sense of experimentation. Instead of taking a unified step forward, OK Go put too little eggs in far too many baskets. They want you to dance, mellow out, be philosophical and actually think that this album is worth your attention all at the same time.

Vocalist Damian Kulash exercises his frail falsetto to exhaustion on the album's "ever so cleverly titled" opener "WTF?". "Do I make my own decision here or am I under your control?" he sings to a faceless bombshell. A stanky synthesizer and low fi bass buzzes mix awkwardly with lightning guitar shreds. While the effort is genuine the results are passable at best.

So goes the rest of Blue Colour. If this album was a steak the whole thing would be undercooked. Each track is littered with moments of forgettable hooks and stale melodies that never pack enough punch to stick with you. In one ear out the other. Imagine if The All American Rejects tried to cover a TV On The Radio album... yeah it's that strange to listen to.

There are bright spots sprinkled through the mediocrity. "Skyscrapers" is the most thought out tune. Kulash stands on the brink of suicide while singing this redemptive tune. Sure it may sound like U2's fantastic "Moment Of Surrender" but I suppose I'm simply giving the song credit for not being an instant write off.

At the end of the day, all I could think about while listening to these 13 toss offs was how these 4 indie nerds would look dancing on treadmills. So after wasting an hour of my time with this album I went to You Tube and watched the summation of this band's entire career in 3 minutes.

Grade: D