Review Summary: This Review Has Been Rated [H] Horrible, for Profanity, Extreme Reviewer Bias, and an Utter Lack of Any Professionalism Whatsoever.
Let’s not make this out to be too much more than it is, please. I’d love to sit here and tell you that
More Songs lives up to its name by successfully building off of
Songs’ success, but I can’t; and chances are, I’m probably much more disgruntled by this sad fact than you are. Imagine for a second that some random-ass band with less prominence than Podunk shows up on your radar. They’ve got it all. Catchy, anthemic choruses with a motherf
ucking zazz overload? Grown Ups perfected it. Awesomely immature lyrics of
“Collecting resin with your bobby pins” and
“Following me in to the mountain air,” sung with a lovably raspy squawk of a voice? Yup, sung it at the top of my lungs on many-a-run with headphones in tightly, obliviously lost in my own world of endless guitar noodling and brilliant start-stop mechanics. Combining the emo aesthetic with an air of poppiness and peppiness into the most lovable thing short of bungy’s profile picture? Goddamit, Grown Ups have more charm than George Clooney when he’s wearing that awesomely-smug, understated grin. Anyway, this cute little emo/pop hybrid creates what becomes the most-played EP you’ve ever set ears on. Hell, it even earns you a little nod from the Sputnik-elite like kitsch. Long story short-- 1. Listen to Grown Ups 2. Fantastically and wonderfully delightful sh
it ensues. It’s that simple. What happens next will blow. your. mind.
Actually, I should’ve seen this coming.
More Songs couldn’t simply have been More
Songs, those miracles don’t exist outside of Disney movies . The same 4 songs from Grown Ups’ EP are present, but they lose a little of that extra charm and sincerity that made me fall so deeply in love with them in the first place. For instance, in “Three Day Weekend” I used to hear the singer clearing his throat very noisily halfway through the song. Sound repulsive? It’s not. At all. I could use another cinematic reference here to compare how, often, remakes of original movies get caught up in “deleting mistakes” or “making improvements” that they miss out on some of the charm that made the original so personable and enchanting.
More Songs is a little like that, but it’s more like “Scarface” where the new product is still f
ucking splendid. Please don’t be put off by my incessant b
itching, because after all’s said and done, this is basically
Songs plus 6 more songs that are similar-sounding, minus a bit of the original charm, equaling what still amounts to one of the best releases of 2010 you’re unlikely to hear much about. While most of the newer Grown Ups output doesn’t
quite stand up to the material on their EP, “Pears,” with some heavenly, noodly guitar work and a particularly surprising song-progression, and “Six More Weeks of Winter,” with some impassioned yelling (complemented by gang vocals, thanks for reading my mind Grown Ups and adding more of these), there’s plenty to celebrate about on
More Songs. Fast-paced and smile-inducing, infectious and hooky, I can’t speak highly enough of Grown Ups’ perfection of the carefree, exuberant aesthetic on this modern, somewhat-emo record. And it’s not like this is overproduced or too saturated, the band is still very much themselves on
More Songs. In the end,
that is what makes the band’s first LP such an excellent success-- it may not be in exactly the same format as the EP I’ve played on repeat for 8 months,
sigh, but it’s still Grown Ups not acting grown-up at all, having and inducing more fun than any record you can find in 2010.
