Rockin' Our Turntable: OK Go
By Tankboy in Arts & Entertainment on Jan 14, 2010 6:40PM
OK Go initially won our hearts through their quirky art-pop when they were based in Chicago and gigged regularly at The Empty Bottle. They moved to California, released their debut and enjoyd moderate success. Their sophomore effort injected a whole lot more rock into the mix with extremely winning results, and we dug 'em even more. They seemed poised to hit the big time -- in no small part due to an extremely entertaining DIY approach to music videos -- and then ... settled into nearly four years of relative silence on the album front.
They break that interlude with an album that rethinks the band's whole approach to music. Whereas hooks used to flow through their songs in abundance and the backbone was the crunch of the guitar, Of the Blue Colour of the Sky finds the band embracing the gods of rhythm and atmosphere. Drums seem pushed to red in the mix, and bass guitar and deep synths are slathered over everything in huge gloppy doses. The hooks are still there, but now they're welded to the songs' underlying structure, propelling them along more subtly than the overt melodies the band employed on past recordings. And even when all of these new elements are stripped back to bare-bone funk essentials, as on "I Want You So Bad I Can't Breathe," the result still comes across like Prince driving a steamroller.
In fact that's an appropriate shorthand for the disc as a whole. OK Go have gotten in touch with a seriously funky side only hinted at in earlier recording, but they've sheathed that soul in a surrounding layer of industrial gravel. It's not surprising that the album is helmed by Dave Fridmann, primarily known for his long tenure of working with The Flaming Lips and Mercury Rev, and his relationship with the band here results in an album that, for once, successfully allows an established band to "expand their boundaries." if we have any complaints its that the band perhaps explored a bit too broadly, resulting in an album that feels slightly overly long, but if that's the price the listener has to pay for OK Go's new sonic adventurism, it's one we're happy to pay.