The Whitest Boy Alive- Rules
3/10

Sometimes you get the impression that music is made on a whim and that some musicians really aren’t challenging themselves. You get that from The Whitest Boy Alive, whose sophomore album Rules has a lot of lazy sounding lounge-y pop songs. Throughout Rules the majority of the songs seem to plonk along, molding together like a jam session between musicians playing together for the first time and failing miserably to expand into anything of real substance. As pop songs, they rely to heavily on bass and not enough on new member Daniel Nentwig’s Italian synthesizer (which is mentioned proudly in the albums press release). The couple of songs where the music does expand, most noticeably towards the end of the album on ‘Promise Less or Do More’ and ‘Dead End’ do help brighten up the album, but only after guitars are rushed in to ensure the album isn’t full of ruthless bass and dead instrumentation. The Whitest Boy Alive’s first album saw them described as an electronic band, but the stripped back material here has them sounding more like The Virgins than Hot Chip; unfortunately without the catchy vibes and expression of both those groups. There are much better albums out there in a similar vein to this one; you’ll do best to look further a field for a band seamlessly making more effort to create something slightly more expansive.
Nick

 

Posted by Nick Fulton under Album, Reviews
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