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Big City Rock Big City Rock
Atlantic / Wea
Frankly, that name is a bigger giveaway than a critic could ask for. Some bands, like Devo or Rage Against the Machine, sound exactly like what they suggest, and Big City Rock is no exception. This is epic, swoony pop-rock, as indebted to Bon Jovi as it is to U2. Then, there’s the proud proclamation on the album’s cover, that Big City Rock is Maroon 5’s “favorite new band.” And any band happy to receive that endorsement isn’t promising anything startling.
Track listing:
01 Sink
02 All Of The Above
03 As Soon As I Find Out
04 I Believe In You
05 Human
06 Kind
07 Better Place
08 Shelter
09 They Won't Mind
10 Touch The Horizon
The songs are guaranteed to please anyone who’d buy an album because Adam Levine thinks it’s swell. “Better Place” is unabashed romantic giddiness (“You make the world a better place/For me”) and “I Believe in You” has a nice, Bono-on-autopilot vibe, but the whole affair is so overproduced that there’s no room to breathe, and any true Rock gets smothered under a cushioned veneer of synthesizers and melodrama. “Sink” is actually near-perfect, so ridiculously uplifting that it shatters all expectations. Too bad the rest of the CD lives up to them. “I would kiss the feet of businessmen,” their singer croons. “If I knew that you had hired them.”
But at the other end of the spectrum, “Shelter” is pure cheese - honestly, lyrics like “Hoping for a day/When everyone can live together” smack of a fourth-grader’s diversity day project. “They Won’t Mind” is totally forgettable, and too 80s for its own good. But then again, that was the era of Big (Fake) Rock, so no wonder this band adores it. The entire CD aches with the vibe of the greed-is-good decade, from Echo & the Bunnymen on “Human” to traces of poppy R.E.M. on “Kind.”
Look, pop is good. I’ll admit it. The problem is when pop thinks that it’s rock, and tries so desperately to be cool. Big City Rock falls in this category - it’s 34 minutes and light as a feather but not stiff as a board; the whole effect is one of needy hipness. Between their posh outfits and pop sensibilities, Big City Rock look great and sound decent, but none of these tracks are memorable for anything except some vague hooks-in-training. So yeah, future single “All of the Above” is a good song (in a shameless Killers pastiche way) but it’s nothing more than that - Big City Rock have gotten a lot of hype about being ‘the next big rock band’ but that’s a misnomer for two important reasons. They don’t deserve to get that big and they really aren’t that rock. So maybe the name doesn’t deliver on its promise after all.
