Review Summary: What's the point?
For the last two decades, rock's final, unthreatened abode in popular music has been the indie scene. Between the spoiled brooding of Vampire Weekend, the theatrical bravado of The Last Dinner Party, and the stoned stagger of King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, in the 2024th year of our Lord Jesus Christ, indie rock sits confidently on the playlists of soon-to-be-adults with low career prospects around the wold and seems likely to remain there. When the final, stalwart fans of rock music clamor for trust fund kid sh
it, theater kid sh
it, and stoner kid sh
it, it certainly doesn't seem unwise for industry cockroaches and modern rock megastars, Imagine Dragons, to pursue the overlap in the venn diagram – generic festival kid sh
it. Thus, the main selling point of their sixth release,
LOOM, dialing back Imagine Dragons’ worst tendencies to crank the fun; pounding 808s and the occasional wub are here to bring Imagine Dragons’ confident, cool lounge rock identity to the dance fiends of the new generation – c’mon hoss, grab a marg and hop on over to the pool, we’re playing the new Imagine Dragons!
Why does saying that feel hackneyed?
Unsurprisingly,
LOOM fails to present many convincing reasons to dance to Imagine Dragons. Okay, sure, if you’re strolling the aisles of Target browsing bikinis, the wubbalicious 808-driven post-chorus of lead single “Eyes Closed” might fool your booty into a guilty bounce, but it hardly has the strength to stand against even the weakest of festival openers. In particular, the languid pace and build of “Eyes Closed” reminds me of a soulless appropriation of EDM producer Daily Bread’s sound, a detail I only mention because you should be dancing to 2023’s
Invisible Cinema instead of
LOOM, thank me later. Nonetheless, on a first listen
LOOM presents a convincing facade, the skeleton of a good album, and Imagine Dragons piece together the abstract details with all the precision of a 90s science textbook – filling their gaps in knowledge with trained extrapolations to confidently detail the exact texture and color of the dinosaur's scaly skin. The issue is that electronic music today has feathers, and Imagine Dragons – these tourists from another time – have decided to make electronic music that lacks them. Thus, the muddy production, overly busy music, and EDM misdirections tacked onto songs that are fundamentally just Imagine-Dragons-by-the-numbers only amplify the undeniable reality that the electronic additions here are completely lifeless. Frankly, Imagine Dragons stumbling through house and EDM music tropes that have been abused for decades to get people to dance stinks of trend chasing and near retirement navel gazing. What feels redeemable at a glance only works as a facade because it gives you the benefit of unthinking enjoyment, a marked improvement over the tread marks on the undies of Imagine Dragons’ career like “Believer” and “Enemy”.
Austerity demands I discuss more of the album, but my point has already been made and is only furthered by working through the tracklist. Opener “Wake Up” is yet another classic example of the band’s compositional competence being ruined by Dan Reynolds doing something ridiculous with his voice; the only true highlight off the album, second single “Nice To Meet You”, reeks like the band begged Thundercat to produce it and he turned them down; “Kid”
s h a m e l e s s l y apes Gorillaz’ “Feel Good Inc.”; “Don’t Forget Me” and “Fire in These Hills” are insipid nonstarter ballads; “Gods Don’t Pray” is another certified fukdahaterz Dan Reynolds’ masterclass; and that’s practically the entire album! Unlike the colossal precursor,
Mercury - Acts 1 & 2,
LOOM is a
brief thirty one minutes, and since one of its ten tracks is a “remix” (read: the same song with a feature) of “Nice To Meet You” with J Balvin, there’s actually only twenty eight minutes of new music here. While there is no denying that the return to upbeat electronica is a significant improvement, at least tonally, over the moody indie rock self-stylistic cannibalizing of
Mercury - Acts 1 & 2, and, similarly, the (mostly) innocuous lyrical themes keep the album from descending into Dan Reynolds grievance posting (don’t look at the aforementioned “God's Don't Pray” or the strange tirade against the cold and mountains that is “Take Me to the Beach” though), nothing here is all that essential, or really even meaningful, to anyone who wants anything even slightly above the lowest common denominator in music. For the foreseeable future, Imagine Dragons are going to continue releasing albums that sound like Imagine Dragons – you likely already understand what mileage you can get out of them and I'm here to tell you
LOOM isn’t the album to change that. Still, with it's lean tracklist and pop-fluff winning combo of "Nice to Meet You" and "Eyes Closed," an optimist could easily posit
LOOM as being the most essential Imagine Dragons album since their debut,
Nightvisions – an album that was inoffensive by every metric, nigh thoughtless, and now entirely irrelevant culturally. You’ve come full circle guys, what was the point?
