It seemed like the Minneapolis boys of Motion City Soundtrack were finally on the verge of some serious radio play: They moved to a fancy label, snagged a veteran power-chord virtuoso Mark Hoppus as co-producer and cranked their Moog synthesizer to a nearly unbearable blast.
Motion City Soundtrack
My Dinosaur Life
Sony
Unfortunately, the bubblegum pop on My Dinosaur Life is little more than an overproduced rehash of the band’s limited repertoire: fast-paced, hyper-lyrical storytelling, climaxing in butter-smooth cries of self-loathing and forced irony. With a hotshot producer on board, you’d think they’d ease up on the high-school poetry (“There’s a buzz/ There’s a buzz/ There’s a buzzing of bugs”) and indulge in the kind of melodic simplicity that made their first efforts — “Feels Like Rain,” “The Future Freaks Me Out” — so freewheeling.
Instead, we get a haggard Justin Pierre bitching about pharmaceutical evils, something about a tourniquet, dinosaurs and dreams. Notable exceptions to their nonsensical babbling are “Skin and Bones,” which employs jumpy repetition to rival Fall Out Boy, and “Stand Too Close,” paring down every song’s obnoxious synth layers and cutting to recall a bit of their original simplicity.
By far the stupidest track is “@!#?@!” (Did I get that right? Am I missing an octothorpe?), which is apparently what Pierre was thinking of when he described the album as “edgy”: “You all need to go away, you motherfuckers/ You all need to leave me and my homeboys alone.” Really. And the rest is so forgettable that it’s better left as background music to the next episode of “Gossip Girl.”
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