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
Imagine Dragons are an interesting band to me, like I said when I reviewed X Ambassadors, they get a lot of undue criticism in my opinion. A lot of people trash Imagine Dragons for being a radio rock band, but I’ll take a half decent radio rock band over the garbage EDM and minimalist pop that dominates the radio these days. When I’ve listened to Imagine Dragons before I found that like most pop leaning rock artists I didn’t care for most of their deeper cuts, especially with Imagine Dragons’ tendency to fill their album with boring soft rock.
I expected their new album Evolve to be much the same; I’d like the lead single, find the second single to be okay and maybe like another 1 or 2 songs off the album. Surprisingly I actually like more songs from Evolve than I dislike. The first couple of songs on this album add some hip hop and r&b elements that I didn’t realize were missing from Imagine Dragons’ sound.
The first track, I Don’t Know Why is basically a Weeknd or Drake song with some 80’s synths and occasional guitar stabs added. The second track, Whatever It Takes is kind of like Imagine Dragons doing a Twenty One Pilots song in the way that it blends rapping on the verses with an alternative rock chorus. The third track and lead single Believer is the perfect blending of these hip hop elements with Imagine Dragons’ typical heavy rhythms and soaring vocals into what is probably the most cohesive track on the album.
If Believer is the Radioactive of this album than Walking The Wire really wants to be the Demons. To me Walking The Wire is one of the worst tracks on the album as it just sounds like a boring contemporary Christian song, even more so than Demons. The better choice for the lower tempo inspirational single would have been the next song on the record, Rise Up. While Rise Up isn’t anywhere near the best song on the album, it has the calm soft rock sound that Imagine Dragon’s second single usually has, and unlike the previous track Dan Reynolds actually sounds invested.
The third soft rock track is up next and it’s possibly worse than Walking The Wire, after this we get the strangest track on the album, Yesterday. This song is really hard to describe, but it’s a strange track that calls to mind The Beatles and Panic! At The Disco. Reynolds also sings in a lower register that reminds me of Rag ‘n’ Bone Man, but despite the weirdness it is a good track.
Then we get Mouth Of The River, which is a well written and powerful rock track followed by Thunder, which is a minimalistic hip hop track. Thunder actually works way better than most trap songs that try to make this same rhythm and beat work. The album closes out with two mediocre tracks that don’t really stand out much, although Dancing In The Dark is kind of trippy with it’s glitchy electronic vibe.
This album has more tracks on it that I like than any other Imagine Dragons’ album I’ve listened to before and some of them are legitimately great songs. Imagine Dragons have greatly reduced the number of terrible soft rock songs on this album and replaced them with more experimental tracks. I also commend them on how they mix in more and more disparate genres and make them work without losing their own sound; that is really what this band does best. I hope they continue to experiment with mixing in the Tron inspired synths and hip hop elements of this album or even some of the string sections from Smoke + Mirrors in the future and drop the crappy soft rock songs entirely. Album on Google Play Album on ITunes Album on Amazon
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.
