Tired of my streak of positive music reviews? Good, because so am I, and Discovery's LP is an excellent place for me to stop gushing over albums. This is mainly due to the fact that--in one word--this album is bad.
With a band composed of Ra Ra Riot's Wes Miles and Vampire Weekend's Rostam Batmanglij, you'd think that Discovery would show at least some interesting potential if not rock everyone's socks off. Instead, the band unleashed LP, a debut album full of shallow songwriting, irregular beat structures, and desperate sounding attempts to be relevant and cool that makes for some mildly amusing hipster party fodder at best.
LP starts out about as strong as it can with fairly interesting tracks like "Orange Shirt" and "Osaka Loop Line" that use some catchy, minimalist beats to sound fresh, but suffer from mediocre lyrics like "Still you won't call me back / And every text I get from you sounds so so serious / But I'm sitting at home sipping this miso / Ticking to raindrops upon my window pane / Texting too fast for me to reply / Never looking when you type T-9." I'm usually not one to nitpick songwriting, but lyrics like that are just plain cheesy. Combine those with the stupidly-popular-yet-overplayed auto-tune vocals, and you've got a pretty good idea of what the rest of the album is like. Well, I honestly have to take that back; it actually gets worse.
By LP's fourth track, "I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend," I was certain that this album was not something I would want to recommend to anyone. With a rather lackluster performance by guest vocalist Angel Deradoorian crying "I wanna be your boyfriend" (before being so "cleverly" chopped up to sound more like "I want a boyfriend"), the whole song sounds like a desperate grab for love and attention from the song's creator. It's sad.
Many of the other songs proceed in either this direction of poorly written and bad/auto-tuned singing ("Can You Discover," "Carby"), or simply opt to have some of the ugliest synth or beat work I have heard on a professionally produced album ("So Insane," It's Not My Fault (It's My Fault)"). Of course there a couple exceptions, but these also have problems of their own.
The strongest track on Discovery's album is probably "Swing Tree," but that's probably because the song is mainly comprised of a synth riff that isn't theirs. In their defense though, "Swing Tree" has a different feel to it than the Tom Tom Club classic, not to mention that the song is a lyrical high-point for this poor, poor LP.
There is one other song that tries to succeed somewhat like “Swing Tree” by combining borrowed melodies and strong songwriting, but the only difference here is that it’s a cover, and a horrible one at that. After hearing what disrespect Discovery paid to “I Want You Back,” the super-hit by none other than the late-great Michael Jackson, it’s hard to believe that this is a band that wants to take itself seriously. Did they really think that screechy, lo-fi synths, cascading beeps, and auto-tune could possibly add something one of the greatest pop songs of all time? Unless Discovery was shooting to add an unlistenable quality to the track, the answer in almost every respect is no.
To try and summarize, listening to LP can be best compared to watching a bad comedy. Instead of witty substance and subtlety, Discovery paints in broad strokes and tries to generate appeal by referencing some of the most salient aspects of contemporary music culture without actually commenting on them. So in the end, you are left with an album full of uninspired songs written by two dudes that seem to think shoving MGMT and Kanye West into Tom Tom Club and Michael Jackson would sound good. And, while I’m not necessarily saying these sounds are completely incompatible, I am saying that Discovery’s attempt to make them work is all but a miserable failure.
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