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We Are Scientists - Brain Thrust Mastery
- Originality is not a crime of which We Are Scientists is often accused. Charges of being Hot Hot Heat or Franz Ferdinand knockoffs have plagued them throughout their career, and it’s hard to deny, they’re guilty as charged. But while they may not be breaking any musical boundaries, they’re good enough at what they do that charges of copycatting slip away.
On their sophomore release, Brain Thrust Mastery, the Scientist boys stick to the formula they had already perfected on their ’05 debut. Songs about hitting on girls, rarely successfully, comprise the album's entirety, simple vignettes told with punchy guitars and an absurd number of catchy riffs and vocal hooks. The entire album can be summed up in the lyric, “We shouldn’t think about last night / Nobody’s proud of what they’ve done / Let’s not argue about what’s right / Let’s just agree that it was fun,” from “That’s What Counts.” But pop music has never been known for lyrical density, so if they aren’t meditating on love and loss in particularly profound ways, the constant sing-along choruses and distortion riffs more than make up for a lack of lyrical insight.
And the fun moments do come fast and, if not furious, at least slightly irked. The opening guitar hook of “Let’s See It” competes only with the “oh oh oh” chorus as the catchiest thing you’ve heard this week. Keith Murray’s pretty-boy vocals may not be nuanced, but they have that perfect '80s tint.
Two years down the line though, there have been a few changes, to both sound and lineup. Founding drummer Michael Tapper departed and, in addition to finding a replacement, the band also added a multi-instrumentalist, adding depth with another guitar, and occasional piano. As a result, the new album finds the band pursuing a more complex sound, adding violin, horns, and even – gasp – an acoustic guitar on the single, “After Hours” (the video for which features a man-man-dog love triangle). Where the debut was fast and rocking from beginning to end, Brain Thrust has not one, but two ballads – and no, that experimentation is not a good thing. If the band is trying to expand their sound, they should take a bolder step than just taking all their old tricks and watering them down. The extra instruments rarely add anything – more often than not, they just pull the punch-in-the-face of the first album back to more of a bitch slap.
With the forward aggression taken down some, the more calculated and layered tracks suggest a plea for radio play. The production, however, ends up being the album’s fatal flaw. The songs are all there, but with layer upon layer of instruments, the former power trio sounds castrated. Whiny lyrics that were formally offset by aggressive playing now come off as pathetic, veering the band a little too close to the dreaded emo label. Not that there’s much actual emotion in Murray’s vocals though. Thanks to a ridiculous amount of auto-tune, the songs could be sung by anyone from Rihanna to Cobain (well, maybe not him). The computerization is perhaps the album’s biggest flaw, further removing the immediacy of their debut in favor of a more radio-friendly sound.
Without the catchy-as-hell debut to compare it to, you probably wouldn’t notice these subtle flaws. The songs are as good as ever, but embellishing them as they do only serves to lose sight of their hook-heavy core. If you mix too many ingredients, you’re just going to end up with a mess. Any scientist could tell you that.
Reviewer: Ray Padgett
new
Reviewer's Rating: 6.5
Reader's Rating: 0
Reader's Votes: 0
Added: 27-Aug-2008
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