If there's one rock journalist cliché that bugs me, it's that relentless tendency to dwell heavily on a band's image, allowing it to supercede the importance of the music in the interest of provoking a laugh or making what is often a frivolous, irrelevant point. A great deal of bands, from the early mop-top days of The Beatles to the afro'd At the Drive-In of today, have found their otherwise wonderful and perfectly noteworthy music suffocated by the ink given to their hair, outfits or backstage antics. Conversely, painfully mediocre bands like Kiss and Cinderella find substantial, undeserved attention simply through their flashy dress codes, using their image to blanket lifeless, pedestrian songs. Needless to say, it's a tactic I usually try to avoid.
And so here I try, objectively as I can, to sit through the self-titled debut of Chicago foursome Ok Go. From the outset, their look is positively loathsome; four clean-cut, Suburbia-ripped pretty boys aspiring to toe the line between indie respectability and commercial adulation. I slide the disc into my CD player, glancing briefly at the Blue-era Weezer poster on my wall which optimistically reminds me of the joy that could abound. But as the music begins, and the bland onslaught of creative ineptitude soaks my room, my mood takes a nosedive.
Fact is, Ok Go seemed to have made every effort to live up to their immaculate, airbrushed image in their music. That the kind of mindless, commercial monotony that dilutes every hint of vibrancy on the record seems wholly intentional is telling, as a comparatively lo-fi collection of songs were apparently scrapped in favor of this supposedly more accessible dreck. The sort of middle-of-the-road, half power-pop/half hair-metal hooks heard on first track and single "Get Over It" plays itself out on nearly every track, using the monster power chords, obtusely ironic lyrics and anthemic send-up chorus as a blueprint for the kind of 21st century arena-rock most people knew we didn't need.
For forty minutes, Ok Go drags on laboriously, with each passing song more desperately anticipating the end. Damian Kulash's lyrics are almost uniformly dreadful, but no more so than on "You're So Damn Hot", what seems to be some kind of aggravating rewrite of "Bang a Gong" with all the substance and style drained from it. Lines like, "You're a bad-hearted boy trap, baby doll, but you're/ So damn hot," are enough to make you despise the English language. Fortunately, the album is saved from total disaster by the band's occasional ear for a good hook, and though you'll knock yourself for it, the reasonably hummable melodies of a handful of these tracks may stay with you for the rest of the day.
When push comes to shove though, Ok Go is either a dreadfully calculated, shot-in-the-dark attempt at accessibility from a band whose heart is in the underground or simply a dull, styrofoam pop record from a bunch of fresh-faced hacks who happened to come across a Weezer fakebook and decided to turn it into a career. Either way, their heart doesn't seem in it, and if you're gonna win the public over, you've gotta at least fool them into thinking you mean it.
