Both of them ended up floating to the top of their repective decade’s by recording booming, larger than life songs. A majority of the album could easliy slot right into a pop radio playlist without anyone questioning it. Nothing on Evolve is held back by the band’s past, but it also doesn’t not sound like ID. That’s always been their strength, but they’ve been hand-cuffed by the bleak and oft-boring indie-rock sound.Įven the odd “Yesterday” feels modern in a respectful way and benefits from being sandwiched between two digestable tracks “I’ll Make It Up to You” and “Mouth of the River”. Crunchy bass, keyboard driven, EDM with a haunting almost Michael Jackson Thiller-era attitude suits Dan Reynolds’ voice perfectly. The opening track “I Don’t Know Why” launches the band into a groove they’ve never had before. Gone are the Mumford and Sons-lite tropes that drowned their previous efforts in genre-hell. It’s a tight 10 tracks crafted as almost a complete electro-pop, snyth-rock experiment. Imagine Dragons were actively trying to change their narrative, almost like they had heard my criticizsim.Įverything from new album has been boss af…I kinda regret giving them so much shit for being Imagine Dragony. Especially “Thunder”, it aggressively tested the idea that slow songs have to be low energy. All of these tracks were huge stadium anthems that eclipsed everything they had recorded to date. They quickly followed that banger up with the strong “Thunder” and before Evolve hit shelves, both “Whatever It Takes” and “Walking the Wire” hit streaming services. “Believer” is the lead single from, yet another appropriately titled, 3rd album, Evolve. Then 2 years later, 2017, I hear “Believer”, and suddenly the game had changed. The storm was over, I could go back to just liking the band, without all the snarky bitterness. Sure, on the strength of the brand, it went platinum, but there were no nationwide pop radio hits. Luckily, their second album, the appropriately titled Smoke and Mirrors was quite the dud. It’s far inferior to some of their contemporaries, and repeatedly hearing their 4 hit tracks blugeoned into my ears got old, really quickly. Sure, I technically still liked the band, but I didn’t understand the obssession with their music. Here’s the point where I started to publicly express my feelings about their popularity. They were so big, similar artists like X Ambassadors were flung into the spotlight. After that, every wanna-be rock-star was on American Idol and The Voice trying to recreate the ultra-produced delivery of “Radioactive” and ID themselves, were poised to be the next The Killers. Then “Radioactive” hit, then “Demons” hit, then “On Top of the World” hit and suddenly they were the biggest rock band in the world, which turns out isn’t that hard to do. Hell, I didn’t even think about them having a 2nd hit single. I didn’t think about them having longevity.
I’ve been a fan of Imagine Dragons since 2012 when I first heard “It’s Time”. Evolve sounds, almost impressively so, as though it’s been created with telly music coordinators in mind – and few others besides.(Evolve is available now in stores and on all major streaming services.)
Elsewhere, there are occasional hallmarks of old: Walking the Wire ventures into stadium lighter-swaying territory, while Start Over is essentially a club remix of Africa by Toto. Opener I Don’t Know Why is all stripped-back synths and awkward mid-tempo beats, while Whatever It Takes was written with a sports highlights package in mind (“I love the adrenaline in my veins”, wails frontman Dan Reynolds, before chart pop’s current obligatory chorus of “woah-ohs” enters). Despite singles such as Radioactive (695m YouTube views and counting) and a No 1 album in the UK with 2015’s Smoke + Mirrors, they remain faceless – something which is only likely to continue as they channel an on-trend, electronic sound for this third outing. L as Vegas’s Imagine Dragons are known for making stadium pop-rock that’s part-Foo Fighters tribute, part- Foster the People, occasionally embracing a Mumfords-style twang, a nu-metal riff or some hip-hop bounce.
0 kommentar(er)
