If you saw my previous X Ambassadors review then you know that I cannot stand this band. Aside from their song designed to sell Jeeps I despised everything on their first album, VHS. Given all of that, you can imagine how much I was looking forward to ripping into their biggest single off of their upcoming second album. Unfortunately, Ahead of Myself actually isn’t too bad.
The first thing I noticed about this track is Sam Harris’ vocals sound much stronger and overall just better on this track. While Unsteady did showcase a bit of his range, it was in a kind of limp and whiny kind of way. Here Harris presents a pretty powerful and full sounding vocal performance. Unfortunately once you get past the vocals there really isn’t much to the song.
There is a little bit of a guitar and some drums here and there but it’s a very empty sounding mix for the most part. This would seem to signal to me that X Ambassadors saw the success of Unsteady on pop stations and decided to lean more in that direction. Unlike a band like Imagine Dragons who walk the line between Top 40 and Alternative, X Ambassadors are falling firmly into Top 40 territory.
I can’t say I expected anything less from this band as VHS was a mess of boring indie songs trying desperately to sound like something deeper. I’m just about ready to call it on X Ambassadors; a boring and unoriginal band with a hell of a lead singer. Overall this song is just okay, nothing special but not nearly as bad as most of their music.
An Album A Day is posted 5 days a week, Monday-Friday
Is it just me or do a lot of people act like Imagine Dragons are the new Nickelback? People act like they are nothing more than a soulless money maker without a style; hell I’ve found out a lot of people who don’t like Dan Reynolds voice. I personally don’t get it, but to those people I would say go listen to X Ambassadors, because after listening to their crappy album VHS you will beg for Imagine Dragons.
Generally I’ve seen these two bands be put in the same category and they’ve even collaborated a few times; because of this I think it only fitting to compare the two. While Imagine Dragons do make a fair amount of obvious radio bait songs, they also make some solid tracks that are deeper cuts on the record and it’s not like most of their hits are bad. Compare to that X Ambassadors, a band so ready to sell out they are literally only popular because of a car commercial. And if it was a case of them getting big off of that and the rest of their album was good or even average, I’d give them a pass but this album sucks.
On the topic of style, Imagine Dragons have a very definitive and recognizable sound even with the way they blur genres a lot. Imagine Dragons two most distinct elements are pounding rhythms and Dan Reynolds very unique voice, now their softer tracks usually drop the huge drums in favor of acoustic guitars, but Reynolds voice is still instantly recognizable. X Ambassadors claim to be a real rock band with some things taken from indie music, and that pretty much holds true. They are an alternative rock band with the pretention and boring sound of indie.
As for the songs on the album, all of them are forgettable as hell. The two exceptions are Renegades and Unsteady which are okay enough songs that get stuck in your head and just become aggravating. Those two tracks are actually pretty good, along with Nervous and B.I.G., but the issue that even these tracks suffer from is sounding generic. The first 6 tracks on this album could literally just be called “The jeep commercial”, “The pop song”, “Bastille knockoff”, “Nick Jonas knockoff”, “even Dan Reynolds can’t save you now” and “Why is this drum and bass?”.
The only thing that almost counts as a constant style is the inclusion of acoustic guitars on most of these tracks, but nothing about the playing is unique or memorable. Lead singer Sam Harris isn’t a bad singer at all, but he suffers from sounding way too much like everybody else. At times he sounds like Dan Reynolds, at other times Adam Levine or Chris Martin from Coldplay with an American accent. He occasionally dips into a more soul singer kind of voice that has a bit of it’s own sound, but overall Harris is just too generic sounding, just like the rest of the band.
Maybe this album is a combination of songs that were written or partially written over the course of the years since they formed and that’s why it feels so disjointed, or maybe it’s just the crappy first album bands put out that used to only go out to a couple of people before the internet. Either way, these guys need to cultivate their own sound before they attempt a follow up. I’d like to see them either take the Panic! At The Disco approach and sound like a slightly different version of a more popular rock band or simply expand on the sound from Renegades more. Who knows, maybe they’re next album will fantastic, after all Harry Styles is now a rock star and Pantera were originally a glam rock band called Gemini; things can change.
