Sick Puppies - Maybe

Fairly important: the formatting on this post goes to hell in most feeds, and it will be best read at ericonthecharts.blogspot.com

Wholesomeness from a band called Sick Puppies, sounding like banal 80's rock.  Que?

Sick Puppies
Maybe
Carpe Diem
#66 (LoMid)
Dec 23, 2010
Shimon Moore
Antonina Armato
Tim James

Artist:
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When the song starts, everyone join me with your best Bono impression:

I have climbed
highest mountain...

Well, that was fun. Maybe we should chip in and buy the Sick Puppies' guitarist an echo pedal. It's christmas, after all: the time for picking on U2. Oh, and free stuff.

This one shifts away from the point where you can make U2 jokes pretty quickly, though-- the verses sink into Richard Marx territory almost immediately, with a kind of Warrant/Poison/Bon Jovi power ballad chorus, a break that was swept off Use Your Illusion's cutting room floor, and just a touch of nasal pop-punk in the lead vocal. If that doesn't sound like an appetizing stew, take it up with the manufacturers.

“Maybe” belies its manufactured origins in its sound: mathematically designed in CAD, played by machines, and then crushed as far as possible into its package. The design of the song is built around the most reliable rock cliches (you remember the turned down half-chorus I mentioned in “The Breath You Take?” Here it is again,) making the first listen come off like a song you've already heard. The inhuman sound, like the layered voices in the chorus and the mechanical, never-varying instruments, were “cleaned up” or “enhanced” in the computer used to record them. As for the crushing*: a song shouldn't be this distorted (not the guitars or one specific sound-- the whole song has been distorted), and it sounds like someone fed it into a piece of gear called “louder for the radio” and turned all its knobs to 11... 

A final note on the sound of this thing: in mixing terminology, you call an instrument without any effects “dry” and one with an effect (like reverb) “wet;” well, this snare drum is soggy. The 80's hairspray bands were lousy with this kind of snare, but this song is absolutely the worst I've ever heard. Apparently, the reason the guitarist can't get his Edge on is because, though he already has a delay pedal, they're using it on the snare drum.

And maybe it's time to change
And leave it all behind
I've never been one to walk alone
I've always been scared to try

So why does it feel so wrong
To reach for something more
To wanna live a better life
What am I waiting for

'Cause nothing stays the same
Maybe it's time to change

Maybe I'm a dreamer
Maybe I'm misunderstood
Maybe you're not seeing
The side of me you should

Lyrically, “Maybe” is the first Carpe Diem song of the project: full of seizing the moment, doing your best, and taking advantage of a brand new day... which I wouldn't mind so much, if it a) wasn't so corny, and b) keeps switching back and forth between “I'm good enough” and “but what if I fail?” When the chorus is so “Yay, I can do it!” it's hard to listen to the whiny verses... well, that, and it's hard to listen to a song that begins with “Maybe I'm just a dreamer.”

Maybe it's hopeless
Maybe I should just give up
And what if I can't trust myself
What if I just need some help

If you don't think it can get sillier than the first verse, verse two opens with a line that has me picturing the guy sulking down the street in the rain, bangs in his face, kicking rocks down the street: “Maybe it's hopeless, maybe I should just give up.” Golly, I'll bet another peppy chorus will have him walking on sunshine again... it keeps cropping up like a Stuart Smalley sketch: whenever you start with stinkin' thinkin', you turn to the mirror and say “I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and, doggonnit, people like me!”

Not to digress, but when the band name is Sick Puppies, how is this the song I get?  It's like firing up a band called "The Wholesome Family" and getting a song about animal necrophiliacs overthrowing the government.  How does the band name like "Sick Puppies" evoke a message of Hey, everybody!  Reach for the stars! 

Even if the lyrics are pretty silly, it's the wild over-production that makes this one unbearable. I'm sure if it was just a guy with a guitar, this song would... well, it'd sound better, at least. As it is, the song already sounds dated, a stale blend of radio rock clichés that have very little to do with chords or lyrics... this sounds the way it does because someone decided to make it into an overblown facsimile of LA rock at its biggest and most inane.

It's the audio equivalent of a geeky kid with huge glasses squeezing into tight, vinyl pants.

Walk

Stay with the song, walk away, or run like hell:

*We could follow an aside about Mastering (a process that, among other things, is often used to make songs sound louder on the radio) down a long and winding rabbit hole, but I'm not going to bore you with that. Generally, when a whole song is crushed to death and distorted in the process, someone did a shitty mastering job... this song is a fine example of a really shitty mastering job. For a quick overview, here is an NPR feature on the issue.