Hootie and the Blowfish have a new CD. Someone alert FEMA. Or
\nbetter yet, the EPA. I think we’re about to have a Category 5
\nMediocricane.<\/p>\n
Look, I get it, OK? Hootie and the Blowfish aren’t particularly
\na bad band; they just aren’t any better than any one of a thousand
\nbands out there who didn’t get breaks, didn’t get MTV exposure,
\ndidn’t get to make videos with Dan Patrick. Hootie and the Blowfish
\nare living proof of one of the axioms of the Saint of Sales, J.R.
\n“Bob” Dobbs: “It’s better to be lucky than good.” Rather than a
\nlife of garage band wonder in Spartansburg, South Carolina, or
\nwherever the hell they’re from, they got five minutes of fame. They
\ncan play state fairs for the rest of their life on a double bill
\nwith Swing Out Sister and Glenn Medeiros, being giggled at by drunk
\nthirty-somethings who are desperately trying to pretend they’re
\nstill in college.<\/p>\n
And guess what? All their new CD,
\nLooking For Lucky<\/i>, does is perpetuate that streak of
\nformulaic mediocrity. You still can’t understand a damned thing
\nDarius Rucker says without a lyric sheet and a competent speech
\npathologist. The rest of the band is still vaguely good looking,
\nvaguely talented, and vaguely in the same key. They don’t really
\nsing harmony, they just all sing the melody at the same time. The
\nproduction and engineering on the CD is OK; the musicianship still
\nbugs me, since Hootie and the rest of the gang seem to have not
\nchanged the effects pedal on their guitars since, oh, 1991. Wide,
\nfuzzy, and reverb-laden; it’s like sterilized garage rock,
\ngenetically engineered to appeal to people who drive SUVs.<\/p>\n
Oh, and once or twice there’s a mandolin. Wow, is that
\nground-breaking or what?<\/p>\n
The songs are boring. The lyrics are insipid. I would like to
\npoint out some particular high and low points, but there aren’t
\nany; it just all dissolves into a beige morass of unchallenging
\nmusic.
\nLooking For Lucky<\/i> is easy and easily forgotten. This is a CD
\ndesigned to be background music at a TGI Friday’s. Only once do
\nHootie and his amigos break the mode, for “Leaving” — which
\ninstead of being mediocre mainstream rock is mediocre country rock.
\nThis stuff makes the Eagles look like Morphine.<\/p>\n
In the end, this isn’t bad enough to be really notable and isn’t
\ngood enough to waste your time on. Don’t even bother, not even if
\nit’s in the cutout rack. If you want to know who’s
\nLooking For Lucky<\/i>, it’s Hootie, every time he looks in the
\nmirror. Lucky that they still have a record contract, lucky they
\never had a career.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":27272,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[5695],"rating":[11205],"class_list":["post-38632","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-hootie-the-blowfish","rating-rating-d-plus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/38632","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38632"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/38632\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38632"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=38632"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=38632"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}