Ask Edward Sharpe, and he'll tell you: all you need is love, and-- you got it-- love is all you need. Roughly half the songs on Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros-- the economy sized L.A. troupe's self-titled third LP-- find Sharpe and company singing about love; not just romance, but a bigger kind of love, a force for good in this mean old world of ours. Radiating positivity from every pore, Sharpe's looking to melt cynicism, to stick a daisy in your gunbarrel, to turn that frown upside down. The onetime Imarobot frontman's transformation from dance-punker Alex Ebert to vibe-peddler Edward Sharpe has taken him well past the point of no return. Where the group's 2009 debut, Up From Below, sounds like a tentative first step toward guru status, everything since that shaky debut suggests Sharpe plans to don those flowing robes for the duration.
Melodically, the Zeros keep things on the up-and-up; the arrangements are spacious, often downright sprightly, and by the time the second chorus rolls around, you'll have the whole thing down cold. And though the generously applied harmonies still sound straight outta 1967 California, everything else seems to be gunning for a kind of Beatlesy universality: were it not for names like "Let's Get High" or lyrics about jackin' it to Miriam Makeba (no, really), you could teach these songs to a class of kindergarteners. But you know how they always let Ringo sing the easy ones? The ones that they actually do teach to kindergarteners? The Zeros' third LP feels like an album made up almost entirely entirely of Ringo songs: bouncy, spirited, and knock-you-over-the-head obvious, a Raffi for the Bonnaroo set.
But it's not the music that sinks Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros, it's those lyrics: well-intentioned, certainly, but as deep as the bowl on a one-hitter. Love is all around, and you can hear it everywhere: on "Let's Get High" ("…on love," ba-dum-ching), on "Two!" ("if we sing together, love will sing along"), again on "Please!" ("hear me love, see me love"). No matter the song, the message never seems to change: love good, hate bad. Even the best song here, a bluesy solo turn from the underutilized, whiskey-and-ginger-voiced Jade Castrinos called "Remember to Remember", can't go by without throwing out a little "praise to love." I can't help but think of David Byrne here: say something once, why say it again? On LP3, Sharpe and the Zeros take their message of positivity uber alles and run it so far into the ground, it's positively wearying.
Not that Sharpe fares a whole lot better with a subject change. Opener "Better Days" finds him railing against "some cliché shit" that makes him "wanna cry"; a bit rich, when you've got a chorus like "try to remember that you can't forget." "Ain't we all just Japanese when we're high" is either baffling nonsense or offensive. And turning the late, great Miriam Makeba into some object of lust oozes something that sure ain't charm. "War is the ego of man's repressed libido," Sharpe sings on "Please!" Bet you didn't know your libido even had an ego.
LP3 centerpiece "Life Is Hard" finds Sharpe taking up the existential longview: "you will not be called a weakling or a fraud," he sings, "for feeling the pain of the whole wide world." But moments like these-- when Sharpe swaps out the moony-eyed mantras for what feels like genuine reflection-- aren't easy to come by amidst the record's gloopy sloganeering. It's not enough that he keeps trying to hammer the same point home ("be good to yourselves, and each other," more or less); he's gotta yowl it into your ear until you've got no other choice but to submit. And "ain't love grand" isn't exactly a new idea, and "we don't have to talk, let's dance" isn't much of a worldview. I'm sure Sharpe's heart is in the right place-- he won't stop saying it is, anyway-- but my heart needs relatin', not platitudes.
