Putting your best foot forward is no excuse if you can't walk the walk. "Blueside", the lead track on Rooney, makes all the Weezer-meets-Beach-Boys rhetoric surrounding this band seem warranted. Sure, it might sound like a bland concept, what with the whining guitar lead and vocals not unlike Mr. Cuomo's, but then the chorus comes crashing in, and it does the things one expects a pop chorus to do: 1) it gets all the harmonies and magical stuff you can't be bothered with while in the moment stuck in your head; 2) it invokes its title, "Blueside", ensuring that gets stuck in your head, too. And consequently, it becomes 3) the one truly memorable part of the song-- the bit you'll find yourself singing hours later-- and, 4) the moment that embarrasses the other parts of the tune so soundly that the listener is left waiting for the chorus to come around again, like a caffeine addict waiting in line at the Dunkin Donuts for something tall, dark, and sugary. It's a style that never goes out of style.
But before you go gaga, join their street team and pledge allegiance to the cute little brown bear featured on the band's propaganda, note that this particular song ends up being the highest high Rooney's record hits. It's not that the other ten tracks pale in comparison-- actually, "Stay Away" is right up there, jonesing on a naïve Cheap Trick vibe-- but all of these songs are the same damn color. "Blueside" gets the benefit of the doubt simply by being the first track. In light of what follows, it's no more or less spectacular a song than any of their others, which is a shame.
The color I referred to in the last paragraph, by the way, is blue. It's the pastel blue you might recall serving as the backdrop of the photograph of those four nondescript fellows on the cover of that record with the song about Mary Tyler Moore on it. But instead of meting the lovey dovey crap with helpings of gunky sweaters and 20-sided dice (or, as all Pinkerton lovers remember, wanton and desperate vulnerability), Rooney offer up detached professional tales of girl-wanting, girl-lusting, girl-having and other male adolescent hormonal endeavors-- the same type of endeavors, by the way, that these immaculately produced pop stars refer to ("You've hit me again one more time", "Bye bye bye bye bye bye goodbye") as "the killers of rock and roll" in "Popstars". As Bart Simpson once said, the ironing is delicious.
Rooney is an acceptably underwhelming, state of the art, guitar-centric pop record. This would be a fine thing except for the hubris on display, best exemplified by "Popstars"-- which, contrary to what Rooney might want to believe, is what they are trying to become. Given Rooney's current label affiliation (that's Geffen, as in Interscope, as in a big honkin' cog in that money machine) and the amount of label-generated buzz these five chaps are currently benefiting from, calling out Britney and Justin for raking in crazy money isn't a brilliant move to bust on your first album. As a wise man once asked, "Why do they gotta front?"
