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 (Epitaph/Shock)
Las Vegas R&B/rock group deliver a limp rendition of everything that sucks about pop music.
Go back in time four or five years and bands that were coming out of Las Vegas were the next big thing. The Killers had wowed everybody with Hot Fuss, Panic At The Disco surprised everyone by selling over one million albums on an indie label. Riding out into the big wide world on the coat-tails of these bands were The Higher, who garnered some attention in 2005 and then dropped off the radar. Going by their third album, It’s Only Natural, it’s pretty clear why. When a band describes their sound as a mixture of R&B and rock, it usually is a euphemism for music that is as lame as a three-legged pony. Dodgy lyrics aside, (I’ll get to that later) the Higher’s mix of synth melodies, beats, and loops, alongside traditional instruments is a challenging assignment to master, and on Play With Fire, they actually do it. But it’s rare, because the rest of the album contains songs that are either overdone or cliché. (see Other Options, a sad rehash of everything that’s wrong with Top Forty, mass-produced pop music) A lot of this comes down to the lyrical weakness of the album. When your music is so cliché that one can conjure up a handful of other bands similar in the first minute of a song, the lyrics better be so damned clever, so witty, so concise even, that it outweighs the shallowness of the music. That’s not the case with The Higher. The lack of ingenuity leaves It’s Only Natural as the aural equivalent of a pile of dead leaves and kindling. Without a spark, there’s no warmth and without warmth, this album is just a blight on the musical landscape.
(Patrick Perrier concurs: “This is the proof that someone at Epitaph is either having a really big joke or is just plain insane. Please stop, it’s not funny anymore.”)
*½
LINDSEY CUTHBERTSON
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