Twenty One Pilots - Twenty One Pilots (2009)
I began writing this review with the premise of starting out with a joke about me going to New York to perform a version of Elton John's "Don't Let the Sun Go Down On Me" redone to be about staying at a friend's house overnight in their guest room, but being afraid that their son is a sexual predator, ala "Don't Let Your Son Go Down On Me", but wouldn't you know it: I Googled it and found out that I wasn't the only one to have come up with that song title. Fucking DRATS, man. I guess it was just as shocking for many fans of this band to learn that they are, in fact, not the first band (by far) to put sad lyrics on top of happy music. I don't really get the hate for these guys, but from this album, I definitely don't get the love, either, even if it's interesting. I like the fact that they included occasional rapped vocals despite the music being far from anything that I'd call hip-hop. I like "Fall Away", the beat is good, the whole "dadadada" thing is smooth, and generally the song is just fuckin' good, and "The Pantaloon" is also pretty alright, but the rest of these songs don't do anything for me one way or the other. They're not offensively bad, they're just bland, and a huge reason for that is because the production is so fucking thin that it doesn't allow the instrumentals to soar the way they should, so the music comes across as painfully flat. That combined with the fact that the latter end of the album just blurs together (and it cares what you think, regardless) just turns it into an album that I'll probably never revisit, no matter how interesting some of the sounds are.
5/10
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