culture. ish. page two

This is car-commercial music. This is music that only feels meaningful when you’re at the bar and you’ve been drinking alone. This is a dull, dull, overproduced album. The lyrics are formulaic and uninspiring, and bear the distinctive shape of Nashville cookie cutter pieces (see, for example, such gems as “Had enough of wondering / what became of all the dreams she had / oh, they're out there somewhere”). The standard piano-rock pieces are mostly split between tracks that sound either like a mix of Coldplay and U2 run through a fruit juicer, or like absolutely generic CCM-ish cuts.

A large part of the problem with this album is the production; “Rolls So Deep,” for example, would be an enjoyable, if unremarkable, Blur-esque number but for the effects on Matt Hales’ voice; as it is, the vocals sound as if they were ground up and pressed through cheesecloth. This album shows some promise, but isn’t actually good in its own right; it’s worth a second listen, but definitely not a third.