After breaking into the stratosphere with their gold-selling debut, Boys Like Girls return with 2009’s Love Drunk, an electro-infused record filled with plenty of fun and radio-ready anthems, but weighed down by reoccurring unoriginality and lackluster.
Boys Like Girls: “Love Drunk” Released September 8, 2009 on Columbia/Red Ink Records
2.5 out of 5 stars
After listening to this record, I must ask the question, “Can a second album be considered a sophomore slump if it isn’t very great, but it is just as good as was the debut?” This statement basically defines Love Drunk, the 2009 release from Boys Like Girls, spearheaded by vocalist, guitarist, and chief songwriter Martin Johnson. Their self-titled debut experienced a slow climb to success before second single “The Great Escape” became one of the most popular alternative pop songs in the nation. The first album wasn’t a high quality release, but it certainly wasn’t bad. And the same quality of music is displayed on the second record, except the band has experienced a major musical makeover. Johnson and crew have left behind most of their alternative rock tendencies in order to embrace trendier, more hip tunes: electro-pop, a change which is obvious within moments of hearing the first track.
The album opens with “Heart Heart Heartbreak,” an extremely solid first track. Featuring better melodies than past singles, beautiful chords, great mixing and guitar tones (that will appear throughout the record), and good usage of synthesizers and effects, this great pop song could do better on radio than almost all the songs that follow on the record, so I have no clue why it hasn’t been chosen as a single yet. The only unfortunate parts of this song are the poorly executed guitar solos and the typical lyrics (which, despairingly, will also appear throughout the record). The next two songs are the songs that actually have been chosen as singles.
First up is the title track, “Love Drunk,” which is honestly a terrible song, at least at times. Between its weak opening and weaker ending, the song takes everything from “Heartbreak” and dumbs it down, feeding the world a pill that is easy to swallow but easier to regurgitate. The chorus has understandably high appeal, with memorable melodies and lyrics that kids love singing to and the world’s most infamous dancing beat, but all of this gives the song no merit. This track could, however, be good therapy for someone who has recently gone through a bad break-up, with its redemptive, “I’m fine without you” mood. Even the ending, even though it ends in a wretched na-na-na manner that has been performed better by inexperienced church bands, has the bright, optimistic feeling of release and renewal, but it doesn’t lead perfectly into the next song. The second single, “She’s Got a Boyfriend Now,” is readily likeable with its Fall Out Boy-feel, where most everything is better than the first single except the chorus; “Boyfriend”‘s chorus isn’t bad, it just doesn’t have the hook a good single needs. This song surely won’t stick in people’s heads as well as “Love Drunk.”
From these first few songs, I can easily assess what to expect from the rest of the record: a bunch of fun gang vocals, dance beats, plenty of falsetto melodies, bittersweet relational lyrics, kicks of electronics throughout each song, ambitiously large layers of instrumentation, and fads. For the most part, this is a correct analysis. However, Boys Like Girls do break these trends with a few surprises and, of course, a good share of ballads, such as the decent Taylor Swift featured “Two is Better Than One.” It is a nice thing that not every song is the same thing, but some of the songs simply feel so different that they seemingly shouldn’t fit on the same record. In fact, the record was actually made in a divided fashion. The first three songs, along with the 80’s pop jam “The Real Thing” and the “Heartbreak” rehash titled “Chemicals Collide,” were all produced and co-written by producing team Hollander and Katz. Those songs all have the same electro-pop feel and clearly belong together, and the latter two have some of the best guitar work on the record. Most of the other tracks were recorded in a different location with a different producer, which causes the sudden changes of pace. And it is three of these songs that give the album its real heart (not the heart on the album’s cover).
“Someone Like You” is the first song to finally attack lyrics from a new perspective. There’s no hook, but this song is not supposed to be catchy. It’s a reflective song, talking about Johnson’s search for a savior from his troubles. Johnson’s lyrics include pretty straight-up lyrics such as “I’m running from Jesus,” but the song still holds enough ambiguity for someone to wonder whether Johnson has found Jesus as his savior after years of running away or if he has found a god or a girl or a friend who is the savior figure he desires. The other two tracks are the album’s last two ballads, “The First One” and “Go.” “Go”’s magic lies in its music, where a mix of acoustic guitars and sweeping strings are carried by a mighty, redeeming jazz riff that concludes the album. “The First One” is simply the album’s best song. After the album’s meandering middle section of filler, hope returns with “First,” which contains the album’s best melodies, best vocal techniques, best drumming, and, most importantly, highest emotion. And yet even though this is more-or-less a ballad, the song also manages to bring a lot of fun and sincerity back into the record. Although this song has a very minute chance of every becoming a single, it shall be a hidden gem for everyone who chooses to embrace this full album instead of just buying a few select songs off iTunes.
The album’s only song that is a complete misstep is “The Shot Heard ‘Round the World.” The song actually has a killer verse and chorus with some similarly awesome production, but the main problem (aside from a terrible bridge that has an unsettling mood change and randomly spews the F-bomb) is the style. The music throughout sounds ripped from a HIM track, and later includes some monstrous sounds and maniacal laughs. I can only imagine that fans of this style would never pick up a Boys Like Girls album, and most BLG fans will skip over this track every time it begins to play.
Really, though, someone can’t be a fan of Boys Like Girls. They are actually a fan of Martin Johnson, the voice and brain behind the band. So how does he hold up? He certainly has improved since the past record, but he still doesn’t have much of an ear for a hook, which is what his music needs. If he can’t write a truly catchy melody, his music will fail in the long run. His vocals also sometimes employ some annoying techniques, and when songs don’t perfectly fit his range (as they do in “The First One”), his voice has a bipolar feel to it. Haven’t you noticed in “The Great Escape” that he sounds like two completely different singers between singing the verses and the choruses? He needs to learn to stick to a range where his voice won’t fluctuate and be so inconsistent. Inconsistency on all musical levels is one of the factors that really weighs down this album. For example, “Go” tries to be uplifting in a “take a chance, you can get through this” sort of way, but why would that work when Johnson has said lines in other songs talking about how he discovered that miracles don’t exist?
No music on this album is terrible, but what really tears the album as a whole down is the lack of cohesiveness along with a potently odorous lack of creativity. Almost every song follows the same patterns, and rarely do the lyrics say anything that hasn’t already engulfed the airwaves a thousand times. Most of the songs are also very similar to songs by Fall Out Boy, All-American Rejects, etc., but both bands have done it better. So is there hope for Boys Like Girls to actually make a full album of good music? Possibly not. Martin Johnson, on the other hand, certainly has potential as long as he figures out what he is good at and pursues it with an ambitious ear and a smart hand. But as for now, Boys Like Girls have released an album that is a bunch of bittersweet-but-fun, danceable summer pop that will please the masses until they are ready to move on to the next big thing.
Best songs: “Heart Heart Heartbreak” “The First One” “Go”
