OK Go - Oh No

OK Go start playing, and I can’t help but be waiting for the catch. It seems too simple, too basic, too good to be true. Here we have a rock band that plays rock, and there’s nothing else. One part of me says “At last, a band with no agenda or plan!” But another part says, “That’s it?”

And indeed, that’s it. I’ll admit that rock and roll has become pretty cumbersome lately, with the likes of Coheed & Cambria and Green Day making high-concept metal and rock, almost qualifying as art. Then you have bands like the Killers, making rock that takes itself very seriously. That’s all well and good, but you need a little fun to balance all that out. OK Go provide the no-strings-attached jubilation necessary to create a break from the ponderous (but still good) rock music that has become all too common these days; the problem is that it passes away so quickly. It’s nice while it lasts, but that’s not very long.

OK Go bears a striking resemblance to the Cars, and their second album, Oh No, has a lot in common with that band’s pop niceties. Oh No is a very pop album, from the high-octave backing vocals to the pastel shirts of the band. The biggest example, however, is in the band’s video for the big single off this album, “Here It Goes Again.” At the base of it, this video is not much; just a stationary camera with no special effects or CGI. It involves the members of OK Go doing an elaborate dance on eight running treadmills, arranged in a 4x2 square, with alternating directions. It’s a little hard to explain, but unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past four months, you’ve already seen this video. It got released on YouTube the day before it premiered, with an insane number of people viewing it the very first day. The dance created such a buzz that many people don’t know that it’s actually the band doing the dance, or even that it’s a music video at all. The dance itself is pretty amazing, and it reminds me of the Mentos and coke thing that some people did, synchronizing the coke explosions to music. If that’s not a pop phenomenon, I don’t know what is.

Oh No begins on a pretty tight and intense note with “Invincible,” a light-hearted superhero story with a dirty groove. Most of the rest of the album sticks pretty closely to that formula, with the deviations (“Let It Rain,” “Maybe This Time”) being kind of haphazard. OK Go is a pretty simple-minded band, and for the most part, they stick to what they have expertise in. It’s when they don’t that things start to fall apart. They don’t exhibit much in the way of originality, either. The guitars and vocals only have two tones (loud and quiet), and the two aren’t really all that different from each other. Like any album of such a specific color, it starts to unravel toward the end. “A Good Idea at the Time” and “The House Wins” are fun and bouncy anthems, but other tracks, like “Television, Television” and “Do What You Want” have a lot of intensity but not much grace, tunefulness, or even pop appeal.

This is only OK Go’s second album, but they should have learned a few tricks of the trade by now. They can’t be expected to be fall-down awesome like the Smashing Pumpkins and the Decemberists were at this juncture in their career, but they are expected to at least progress a little. All in all, Oh No isn’t groundbreaking or world-changing, but it does make you snap your fingers and nod your head a little. There just wasn’t anything to make it very memorable.

Prime Cuts:
Here It Goes Again
Invincible
The House Wins

22 Rating: 3