Categories : Rock + Pop.
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Rating: 2/5 Reviewer: Nathan Atnikov |
For all of the inventiveness that Timbaland has brought to hip-hop over the years, his first foray into the world of R&B lite as overseer of OneRepublic is a painfully tedious affair. Their debut, Dreaming Out Loud, is a Backstreet Boys-as-rock band experiment that never gets out of neutral, in between the crescendo laden choruses and the overly emotional vocal delivery of Ryan Tedder.
While the band attempts to ape everything from Coldplay to Justin Timberlake, they actually seem to take more cues from the current crop of presidential candidates, powering their campaign of love on slogans such as, “Goodbye apathy, hello fancy free!â€
Oddly, we can’t even be really sure that these are the straightforward love songs they seem to be. The liner notes suggest that the band is deeply religious, and their songs about girls are actually just poorly disguised songs about God, as if they’re unwilling to sing honestly about the topic that really interests them.
Despite all this, and thanks to the producers behind the record, the songs are slick enough to be bearable. Dreaming Out Loud is just the type of thing that could play inoffensively in a dentists’ office – it isn’t grating enough to be truly annoying, and it’s not memorable enough to be bothersome.
