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?
Artist:
Play:
Style:
Billboard:
Week of:
Writer(s):
Producer(s):
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.
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.
