There's a commonly held belief that divisive art has to be doing something right, but that assumes a confrontational intent on behalf of the artist. As such, it does not account for a record like Free Energy's Love Sign. It's certainly difficult to imagine anyone being lukewarm about it: the Philadelphia band's unyieldingly and unrepentantly shiny, happy jukebox hero-rock either predates or ignores all tenets of punk, and if you hold certain indie ideals sacred, it is likely the antithesis of everything you want out of music. Conversely, you might think those very tenets make a band like Free Energy a necessary counterbalance. So the question gets flipped: when a record that so desperately wants to be universally loved ends up being divisive, is it doing something wrong? Well, the current state of the music industry certainly couldn't support anyone's ambition to be the new Cheap Trick, but Love Sign's belief in the righteousness of its intentionally big, dumb songs being big, dumb and nothing else ultimately sets Free Energy up to fail.
Anachronism should be the least of Free Energy’s concerns: for all of the "That 70s Band" affectations that accompanied their occasionally charming and novel 2010 debut Stuck On Nothing, most of Love Sign is actually slick, subcompact power-pop that traces its lineage from the Cars (without the jittery, new wave idiosyncrasies) to Blue Album Weezer (without the emotional reckoning) to Jimmy Eat World (without the generous heart), and unfortunately, back to latter day Weezer in how it aggressively cops to its own formulism as a preemptive strike against critique. And do they ever love those groovy girls who just want to dance all night. That last part is important: seemingly every other song makes some sort of reference to dancing or shaking it all night, but only one is actually called "Dance All Night".
It's a powerful image to conjure, particularly when it has absolutely no currency with what most would consider "youth music" in 2013 and could be all the more attractive for it. But in the context of Love Sign, you have to imagine a version of Dazed and Confused that removes any and all references to sex (a lyric about "making out with your lipstick gloss" is as close as you get to second base), drugs, or antiauthoritarian behavior. Which leaves you with basically a five-minute short about getting Aerosmith tickets. The fatal flaw of Love Sign is its failure to realize "good clean fun" is a contradiction in youth-oriented rock. If so much of Free Energy's praise thus far has taken to the theoretical-- you could totally hear it coming out of an airbrushed van! These could all be hits in 1975!-- it's because none of it feels inspired by anything resembling a real human interaction.
You don't have to look any further back than Japandroids' Celebration Rock for proof that lyrics don't have to be based in reality to trigger very real and very powerful emotions and that the best antidote to crippling nostalgia is the belief that tonight could really be the best night ever. But Free Energy offer nothing of themselves but the most obvious rhymes possible between the most obviously placed "whoas" and "heys" in a way that feels borderline insulting to the listener. This carries over to the music as well; for a bunch of self-styled classicists, their depth and appreciation for 70s pop-rock seems to go no further than the exact sounds and signifiers that would be coopted by a commercial for a free credit report, all of which makes John Agnello's plasticine production uncomfortably on-the-nose. It's possible that hearing a cowbell or a harmonized guitar solo or any of the riffs that could pass for slight variations of "You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet" can still trigger a smile. Yet, by pushing these buttons as often as possible, they become nothing more than Spike Jones-style audio gags.
That's not to suggest Free Energy are being cynical or opportunistic on Love Sign; there are much easier ways to achieve stardom in 2013 than to self-release an album of this nature. It is sincere-- the way your drunk uncle sincerely wants to make you laugh when he tells an off-color joke, the way a guy who uses a pickup line at a bar sincerely wants to sleep with you. But when you consider the far more dubious genres privy to salvage jobs as of late, the problem isn't the form so much as the utter void of expression. You think back to similarly minded bands that punctured indie's inflated sense of self and the kitsch quickly gave way to an underlying, unshakeable vision. Sloan had the encyclopedic knowledge and chops to serve as satisfying meta exercise and compete with the power-pop originals, the Darkness juxtaposed the groupie-slaying connotations of their music with incredibly nerdy puns about STDs, masturbation, and RPGs, Junior Senior traded in subversive and very non-subversive sexual politics, Andrew WK didn't make a record so much as a code of ethics. Then again, Free Energy may have done the same thing; their first album merely took the phrase "stuck on nothing" as its title. Love Sign actually lives it.
