Remember that big 64-pack of crayons back in kindergarten? With so many choices in hand, it was always tempting to keep adding color after color and layer after layer of vibrant wax onto the page. But there was that tipping point – that brink when the barrage of color stopped adding to the art and started to distract, turning that crown jewel on Mom’s fridge into a monstrosity of hues, an oversaturated mess.
Music can be the same; there is a tipping point at which something can become so overly done that it loses its humanity. OK Go’s latest release, “Hungry Ghosts,” finds the band lost in a sonic onslaught of its own making.
The Los Angeles-based musicians known for their catchy songs and quirky self-made music videos, have clearly overdone it this time.
A few listens can help reveal where the band may have been aiming, and perhaps somewhere in these 12 tracks the fantastic album the group sought might exist. However, those intended songs are just hard to hear through the dense wall of noise – the result of overproduction and excessive compression.
That wall of noise keeps this latest installment of the band’s iconic brand of saccharine electropop inaccessible and alien – sapped of any real sense of humanity. It’s almost as if a robot made the album: All the data, the ones and zeros, are there; they just don’t seem to add up to anything.
“I want it loud as hell/ I want the walls to melt/ Because I’ve got to lose myself tonight,” muses lead singer Damien Kulash in “Turn Up the Radio”
On paper, these lyrics seem solid; most listeners can empathize with the need to get lost in a song every now and then. Yet accompanied by the storm of synth and sung in Kulash’s monotone falsetto, it seems stripped of any actual feeling. This pseudo-human record called “Hungry Ghosts” knows that people like to get lost in a song as an idea, but it doesn’t seem to know how it actually feels.
The humanizing quirkiness of the band that gave the world “Here It Goes Again” and “This Too Shall Pass” is gone, and the emptiness of where it once was is blatant enough to cause fans to stare into the eyes of this album and say, “Wait a second, you’re not OK Go.”
“Bright as Your Eyes” seems to come just in time to defend the band from this claim with an array of pretty words like “moonlight” and “stars.” The song seems to be an attempt at a staccato, lifeless rendition of the balcony scene in “Romeo and Juliet.”
“They will never shine bright as your eyes/ They will never shine like your eyes,” Kulash sings.
This Shakespeare-esque line is constantly repeated in “Bright as Your Eyes,” leaving the listener to ask two questions: How long did it actually take to compose such a thing, and how much longer before it ends?
The less strong-willed may hit the skip button, landing them in “I Won’t Let You Down.” This song might very well define “Hungry Ghosts.” It’s now-ironic title is the first line of the song, and the second, and the third – granted Kulash modifies it slightly line by line. It’s this kind of chorus-style construction of intros and verses that finds the album getting lost in itself.
If the album has a saving grace, it is “The One Moment.” As if to fulfill some self-made prophecy, Kulash belts out, “And this will be the one moment that matters.” True to his word, it marks the first instance when the listener is prompted to feel something from this album. The drums, the choppy rhythm guitar, the slow crescendo. This song could have been something great before it hit the mixing booth.
The album marks a step in the wrong direction for the band and poor debut as its first off of the band’s new independent label, Paracadute. The freedom to do whatever it wanted has resulted in it doing far, far too much.
– Nick LaRosa