Review Summary: A disastrously bad album, an inoffensive fart in a bathtub full of indie pop mediocrity, and a primer on how NOT to change your sound.
With 2011's
Sparks, Fiction Plane had settled on a bankable, extremely likable sound that combined elements of catchy, almost Maroon 5-like pop rock with the energy, vocals and musical depth of The Police and an eye towards genre experimentation, with each song having its own distinct character. This was topped off with very tasty vocals from Joe Sumner, bassist and frontman as well as the son of legendary Police frontman Sting, with guitarist Seton Daunt and powerhouse virtuoso drummer Pete Wilhoit rounding out one of music's better well-known secret pop rock acts. Their prior records were decent, spawning some minor hits internationally ("Cigarette", "Two Sisters", "It's A Lie") but only hinted at the depth and expansion of sound on
Sparks, and all but cemented a bright future.
So that's why after listening to
Mondo Lumina, I'm pretty much at a loss as to why the hell they decided that a soft, formulaic indie pop direction was the best move. The band has almost completely shed their energetic pop rock songs and slick musicianship for formulaic, boring atmospheric pop songs that go nowhere and have little, if any discerning highlights. In fact you could make a strong argument that the band literally doesn't sound anything like itself anymore, which could be a good thing if the progression was a natural one. But there's no escaping that this feels like a very forced attempt at gaining a wider audience by simplifying, dumbing down and outright eliminating every single element that made the band what they were, in a fit of industry-approved "artistic maturation".
It would be one thing if the songs were any good, but the lack of any real energy on the entire album until the very last track "Blind Pilot", which is probably the only song that sounds somewhat reminiscent of their older work with its lively danceable downbeat. So what we have is a record that is paced terribly, starts at a delicate, airy pace and continues on and on until it becomes pretty interminable. The songs are just so bland and generic they could be written by literally
any radio indie pop band still ripping off Coldplay/Travis/Snow Patrol years after that was even a thing. It's pretty disappointing and a bit shocking that the talent, character and sound they helped to cultivate on the prior the records has been so thoroughly discarded in favor of what is clearly a calculated sell out to radio-friendly pablum. Joe Sumner sounds the least like his father Sting on this album than any other (likely a conscious choice) but the problem is his otherwise fine singing is tethered to boring songs, in most of the songs just lack any type of real hooks to engage the listener. Guitarist Seton Daunt sounds like he fell asleep halfway through reading How To Play Intermediate Guitar Like U2, a far cry from his tasteful, textured and exciting guitar work on previous records. And you definitely know something's off when Pete Wilhoit (legitimately one of the best drummers on the planet that wins awards for his skills) sounds like he's been replaced by a drum machine set to Xanax Mode.
It's hard to really mention any individual tracks on this record that stand out, because not once in the entire time listening to it was I ever moved to even find out what the name of the song was. Yes, it's literally that boring, which is worse due to the fact that the songs themselves aren't exactly bad. They're just completely harmless, inoffensive and bereft of any character to the point where you don't even care that you're listening to it, which is far more damning considering how amazingly talented and catchy the band has proven themselves to be in the past. This is something your mid-50s mom would probably enjoy thoroughly as background noise while reading whatever horseshit book Oprah has next on her list, or music you would not find out of place in a Valtrex commercial. Summed up,
Mondo Lumina is a disastrously bad album, an inoffensive fart in a bathtub full of indie pop mediocrity, and a primer on how NOT to change your sound.
