Review Summary: Dull enough to put even a hardcore Pillows fan to sleep, this is one album that's not worth waking up to hear.
It’s natural to regard a change in record label with less suspicion if it’s from one major label to another – as was the case when The Pillows migrated from King Records to Avex Trax in 2007. But on closer examination, it’s a bit more alarming than it might seem. The Pillows spent over a decade with King Records, who are a little bit more adventurous than your typical big-name label: after all, they put out records by the likes of Bloodthirsty Butchers, who are anything but a commercial rock band. And Avex is known, perhaps most dubiously, for a roster of artists include mega-selling pop starlet Ayumi Hamasaki.
So how do The Pillows weather their label change? Well, not so great, although how much of that is really due to the label is up for debate. Despite the flashes of golden-era songwriting on My Foot, The Pillows had been on something of a decline since 2002. Wake Up! simply constitutes another step in the continued cartoonification of The Pillows. The Pillows haven’t come across as a totally serious band since at least 1998, but you get the impression that by 2007 they just don’t care anymore. The lazy, uninspiring album artwork (which characterizes most of their Avex releases) doesn’t do much to inspire confidence in the music held within.
Wake Up! actually doesn’t get off to a bad start. The band has ditched (at least for the moment) their forays into surfabilly, instead adhering pretty closely to the style of Good Dreams and My Foot: Wake Up! Dodo has some enjoyable guitar riffs and gets the album off to a good start. But Youngster (Kent Arrow) is tame, bland pop-rock that has no energy and not even any fun guitar playing. Propose is a decent enough song in the vein of the first track, but it's nothing we haven't heard done many times before, and much better, in previous Pillows songs, and has little to commend it.
Scarecrow is one of Wake Up!'s few strong tracks, and even though the seasoned Pillows listener is struck by the impression that they’ve heard this all before, at least it manages to sound genuine and carry the listener’s interest into the excellent guitar solo courtesy of Manabe, the song’s standout moment. Unfortunately, this is one of only a few bright spots in an otherwise bland slog of an album.
It’s worth pointing out that Wake Up! might have fewer downright irritating songs in comparison to Penalty Life or My Foot, but it also lacks the best moments of those albums. Wake Up! is a tepid, safe album that neither risks nor gains much of anything. After Scarecrow, Wake Up! descends into a forgettable stream of boring songs, paint-by-numbers parodies of The Pillows’ past greatness. One almost wishes that The Pillows would do something audacious and different here, even if it failed spectacularly, so that the listener could experience some sort of emotion other than stultifying boredom.
Only the end of the album brings anything energetic or enjoyable to the mix. Century Creepers and Sweet Baggy Days show a hint of the energy that made That Future Is Now and Heavy Sun into memorable thunder-pop workouts. But even so, it’s hard not to feel that The Pillows are just going through the motions, recycling old ideas well beyond their sell-by date. And in the case of the last song, the stupid Engrish lyrics drag down what’s an otherwise decent song. The Pillows have always used Engrish lyrics in their songs, but with each successive release they seem to be turning increasingly asinine and juvenile, to the extent that it eventually comes across as self-parody.
Wake Up is not a completely awful album but it’s so underwhelming in light of The Pillows’ previous successes that it’s harder to forgive than if some other band had released this record instead. It lacks the unifying atmosphere of Good Dreams or My Foot, two albums that are better than the sum of their parts. Two or three songs from Wake Up! remain good enough to justify inclusion in a best-of album constituting the group’s post-2006 output, but otherwise this album has little to commend it to even hardcore fans of The Pillows.
