Oh hey you guys are music listeners? Great! Me too! Wanna know which band I almost never listen to? Neon Trees. Is it because I don’t like them? Nah, I don’t dislike Neon Trees, I’m just not amazed by them. Will it stop me from giving my amateur opinion on their new album “Picture Show”? No “¦unfortunately for anyone who is more informed than me, it will not.
So this is how I am going to assess the album during what is called “Marge’s Album Amateur Hour.”
Sorry for any of you die-hard fans out there (and by this I don’t mean fans of the movie “Die Hard,” but rather, committed, zealous Neon Trees fans), but this album and this band just don’t impress me all that much.
Not to say that they don’t impress me at all. That’s what all that much means; it’s not a ton and it’s not nil, it’s just “OK, cool, this is a fun band.” They’re talented, they have some really high energy, sometimes interesting music and their song lyrics are not half bad”¦though oftentimes hard to discern (lyrics are a big deal for me.)
But I wouldn’t say Neon Trees is more outstanding or distinctive from a lot of other bands out there right now. The few truly interesting and memorable songs on “Picture Show” (“Everybody Talks” and “Mad Love” for me) get somewhat lost in the otherwise slightly homogenous tracks. Sorry die hard fans “¦ and this time I do mean the Bruce Willis enthusiasts.
Maybe if I spent a lot of time sidling up inside each song and savoring it and permitting it to make me feel all sorts of bubbling emotional responses I would be more amazed. Some albums take time to unlock. But I’m not entirely convinced from a couple of listens that it’d be worth it. The album is fun, but not fascinating.
Sometimes it does make me feel emotion-type sensations. Mainly like living inside some high school fantasy (I’m thinking of a cliché laughing nighttime montage of my friends and I standing up through a car’s sunroof in formal dresses.) I also enjoy shaking my hair to their sometimes very ’80s-esque beats. And at other points in the album (again, “Everybody Talks” and also, “Weekend”), I feel compelled to do some high paced dances that involve mass amounts of twirling, dipping and high kicking. Sometimes simultaneous high kick-dip combos. But to get real, it doesn’t take a ton to start me up on high kick-dip combos.
Like their first album, which produced “Animal,” the song that everyone knows and I felt tired of after a couple of weeks, I think “Picture Show” will produce a couple of fun singles that will exhaust themselves quickly while still maintaining Neon Tree’s marketable, and yes, enjoyable sound.
Score: 6.5/10
