I waited a long time to buy this album, and a longer time to review it.\u00a0 When you\u2019re talking about a band you\u2019ve followed for more than a decade, that\u2019s rarely a good sign.<\/p>\n
Of course, Train today is only 60 percent of the Train that started out in 1998 with their self-titled debut and hit single \u201cMeet Virginia.\u201d\u00a0 In the process of cutting 2003\u2019s My Private Nation<\/i>, the band shed first bassist Charlie Colin and then rhythm guitarist Rob Hotchkiss, replacing both with studio musicians and sidemen, leaving lead voice Pat Monahan, guitarist Jimmy Stafford and drummer Scott Underwood as the sole official members of the band for subsequent albums.<\/p>\n
Save Me, San Francisco<\/i> kicks off with the title track, an ode to the boys\u2019 hometown that is by turns rousing and embarrassing.\u00a0 The hook is a monster\u2026 but so is the lyric.\u00a0 \u201cI been high \/ I been low \/ I been yes \/ And I been oh hell no \/ I been rock and roll and disco \/ Won\u2019t you save me San Francisco\u201d goes the sing-songy, cringe-worthy chorus.\u00a0 The entire carefully modulated construction\u2014even the sloppy moments appear precisely calibrated to charm\u2014feels like nothing so much as a commercial jingle (more on that thought soon), in the sense that the catchiness of the hook demands that you sing along even as the lyric makes you feel like a moron for doing it.<\/p>\n
Follow-up track \u201cHey, Soul Sister\u201d does nothing to dispel this first impression.\u00a0 As calculated as a television ad’s background music\u2014which is how most people now know the \u201chey\u2014hey-AY\u2014hey-ay-AY-ay\u201d chorus thanks to Samsung\u2019s ubiquitous campaign\u2014\u201cHey, Soul \u00a0Sister\u201d is in fact about as soulful as a slice of Wonder bread.\u00a0 The idea that it\u2019s become the biggest hit of the band\u2019s career is a compliment to every act that refuses to cater to the lowest common denominator; this is what you get when you do that, and it isn\u2019t a pretty sight.\u00a0 Never has a string of superficial, self-indulgent lyrics (\u201cYour lipstick stains \/ On the front lobe of my left-side brains \/ I knew I wouldn\u2019t forget you \/ And so I let you go and blow my mind\u201d) meant so fleetingly much to so barely-paying-attention many.<\/p>\n
And the rest of the album gets worse.<\/p>\n
I would go into greater detail, but you really only need one song description: spare intro builds quickly to swelling chorus with Monahan\u2019s voice way out front, melodramatic vocals delivering pseudo-hip, often-ridiculous lyrics, repeat, crescendo and you\u2019re done.\u00a0 Times nine.\u00a0 \u00a0The roaming, diverse musical landscape of the Brendan O\u2019Brien-produced discs Drops Of Jupiter<\/i>, My Private Nation<\/i> and For Me, It\u2019s You<\/i> is gone, washed away by a sea of lame white-boy-soul posturing.\u00a0 Even borrowing half a song from the Doobie Brothers (\u201cBlack Water\u201d interpolates with \u201cI Got You\u201d) doesn\u2019t accomplish more than pointing out how creatively bankrupt the rest of this disc is.<\/p>\n
This album in fact sounds after the first two tracks like a Pat Monahan solo release; with rare exceptions (the lively but annoyingly repetitive \u201cYou Already Know\u201d and the overcooked second half of \u201cBreakfast In Bed\u201d) Stafford and Underwood come off as faceless as any of the studio musicians Monahan employed for his 2007 solo disc Last Of Seven<\/i>.\u00a0 It\u2019s a wonder he bothered to come back, but he seems to recognize that a brand name is a brand name, and Train have surely pumped new life into theirs with this smartly marketed effort.<\/p>\n
Plenty of critics have slagged Train over the years as mainstream sell-outs, a group that seemed all too eager to sacrifice their musical imagination on the altar of commercial success.\u00a0 I\u2019ve defended them in the past because until now they\u2019ve always managed to be more than that, dipping their toes in a variety of genres and offering a sort of quirky, earnest charm with flashes of genuine grit and imagination.\u00a0 Save Me San Francisco<\/i> arrives 100 percent grit-free; it\u2019s 50 percent commercial calculation and 50 percent pure narcissism, a pair of mindlessly catchy pop tunes grafted onto an album otherwise littered with weak hipster posturing and assembly-line power ballads.\u00a0 This album will surely make Train Inc. a handsome buck, but there\u2019s little here that any fan of music that matters will care about beyond next Tuesday.\u00a0 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":30488,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"artist":[6663],"rating":[5616],"class_list":["post-42153","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-train","rating-rating-d"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/42153","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\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42153"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/42153\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30488"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42153"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42153"},{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=42153"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=42153"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}