Faith-Based Blowfish: "Hootie & The Blowfish" Continues Feel-Good Melancholy Pop Rock With Looking For Lucky.

The Good: Decent vocals, Decent lyrics
The Bad: Some obvious rhymes, Instrumentally predictable
The Basics: One of the more solid Hootie & The Blowfish albums, Looking For Lucky has all the jingles and hooks, without the commercial success.


Hootie & The Blowfish may well be the greatest one-album wonder band of the 1990s. I mean, there were one-hit wonders, but few groups had a debut like Cracked Rear View and then nothing that truly followed it up. MatchBox Twenty, for example, had a comparable debut with Yourself Or Someone Like You (reviewed here!), but they were able to hold pretty strong (and critically improve) with their sophomore album, Mad Season By MatchBox Twenty (reviewed here!). But Hootie & The Blowfish? They had their day, their flash in the pan and they never duplicated that.

So, by the time Looking For Lucky comes along, one might suspect that virtually everyone would have given up on Hootie & The Blowfish, much like the mainstream gave up on the Spin Doctors. With Looking For Lucky, though, Hootie & The Blowfish made a pretty solid album that seems to duplicate the sound and feel of Cracked Rear View (reviewed here!), only . . . no one was listening. I strain to recall what we were all listening to in 2005 instead of Hootie & The Blowfish, but Looking For Lucky pretty well bombed, but objectively evaluating it, it is hard to say quite why. After all, the album continues in the tried and true formula of Darius Rucker's strong, deep vocals clearly articulating the lyrics the band wrote, backed by a garage band pop-rock sound.

With twelve tracks, clocking in at 42:31, Looking For Lucky is perhaps the most collaborative effort Hootie & The Blowfish has done to date (at least that I've heard). Only two songs are written exclusively by the quartet of Bryan, Felber, Rucker and Sonefeld. The other ten tracks are co-written with a bevy of other writers. The main vocals are still performed by Darius Rucker with backing from the other three members of the band and all four continue to play their own instruments. There are, however, additional instrumentals provided by people like John Hobbs, who plays piano and mellatron on "The Killing Stone." As well, there are additional backing vocalists, like John Cowan on "Leaving." As well, Hootie & the Blowfish is not credited with being involved in any aspect of production of Looking For Lucky.

Looking For Lucky is a remarkably typical Hootie & The Blowfish album, as far as the sounds and instrumentals go. This is pretty upbeat sounding pop-rock. Looking For Lucky has much more spirituality or faith to it than other Hootie & The Blowfish albums, with songs like "Another Year's Gone By" and "Get Out Of My Mind" making references to god and the soul and such. It works for the sound and feel of the music of the band, but those who object to such things ought to know up front that this is a pretty loaded album as far as the content of spirituality and unrelenting moralizing.

Indeed, if there is anything that truly unifies Looking For Lucky, it is that melancholy sense of the oneness of the world in god's hands. The lyrics take a pretty direct acceptance of faith and glorification of god, loving thy neighbor and the like. Nowhere is this more obvious or direct than on the song "The Killing Stone," with its lines like "I heard the preacher man speaking on the radio / I remember thinking I would like to tell him where to go / Go back to that book that you've been waving around /Open it up, and go to that part about / You without sin, pick up that stone . . . you can't hide / All that lies beneath . . . The killing stone." The song goes on to express a desire for salvation in very Christian terms, including redemption of the soul. The men of Hootie & The Blowfish are filled on this album with the apparent need to proselytize. They do it well with generally catchy tunes, too, like "Smile," an upbeat insistence that everyone just try to smile.

Songs like "One Love" continue a pretty obvious christian theme through the end of the album. Unlike most Hootie & the Blowfish albums that are filled with songs that are essentially little stories, there is only one musical story on Looking For Lucky. That's "Autumn Jones" and in the tradition of prior similar songs, it tells the melancholy story of "Autumn Jones / Do you remember when your Daddy said goodbye / How you blamed yourself as tears fell from your eye / He was gone . . . I understand your soul, it feels like cryin'." This is yet another Hootie & the Blowfish song with a terribly depressed protagonist who is just wallowing in their misery (a la "Let Her Cry" from Cracked Rear View). One supposes it still sounds new and different because it was never severely overplayed.

In generally, the lyrics are good. The poetics are direct and generally have something to say. The only real exception to the lyrical quality comes in the fairly mindless pop song "Hey Sister Pretty." On that track, the lyrics go pretty stale opting for the easy rhymes with lines like "Hey sister pretty your lips are on the city / Everybody's waiting for the honeymoon to end / I'm still trying to stop this thing from dying / Don't forget to kiss before you beat me up again" ("Hey Sister Pretty"). I honestly don't know what it means to have one's lips upon the city, but perhaps it's a Southern colloquialism. As it stands, it just sounds silly to me.

Sadly, the defiance of the predictable rhymes only sounds lame on Looking For Lucky. This occurs prominently when, on musing about love, there comes the line "All it costs to find out is time" on "Free To Everyone" and - despite the truth of the line - it just crashes and burns.

Musically, Looking For Lucky is pretty much what one would expect from a Hootie & The Blowfish album. The songs are generally upbeat in their tempo and sound fun no matter how bad the musical protagonist of the song is being tormented. This sounds like a what it is: a guitar bass, drums band given enough funding to make their album sound big, bold and professional. There are, however, two exceptions to this on the album.

"The Killing Stone" is terribly derivative in the vocals and some of the opening instrumentals of the MatchBox Twenty song "Rest Stop." Indeed, if there were ever a track where Darius Rucker was doing a Rob Thomas impersonation, it is "The Killing Stone," at least in the beginning. The thing is, this is still a wonderful track with a great message, it just sounds produced in a very atypical way for Hootie & The Blowfish.

The other song is "Waltz Into Me," the final track on the album. This is a true waltz and is sounds wonderful in a very down home, "we're cool enough to get away with this" way. The album closes on this strange high note because Darius Rucker and the men of Hootie & The Blowfish are cool enough to do a smooth, ballad waltz and make it work. It sounds like nothing else on the album and, indeed, nothing else the band has on their other albums that I have heard.

As I wrap this up, I have to say, I enjoyed Looking For Lucky more than any other Hootie & The Blowfish album outside Cracked Rear View. While some of their other albums might be boring, Looking For Lucky is not and when the band releases an inevitable "Greatest Hits" album, given the lack of singles from this one, it might well be the best value for an album to keep on the shelves next to their greatest hits for a more rounded sense of the band's abilities.

The best track is probably "The Killing Stone," the low point is the repetitive and somewhat vocally monotonous "Another Year's Gone By."

For other Artist Of The Month reviews, please check out my reviews of:
Rumours (2-Disc Version) – Fleetwood Mac
Useless Trinkets: B-Sides, Rarities, and Unreleased 1996 – 2006 - The Eels
Opiate - Tool

7/10

For other music reviews, please check out my Music Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2013, 2008 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
| | |

Growling Toward Mediocrity: Fairweather Johnson Reintroduces Hootie & The Blowfish As A Boring Band.

The Good: Generally good vocals, Some interesting lyrics
The Bad: Instrumentals are a bit bland, Album sounds somewhat monolithic
The Basics: With a VERY weak "recommend," Hootie & The Blowfish pull off a very average album that is, at its least, different from their debut.


After many years of hearing their radio hits, I have finally started picking up albums by Hootie & The Blowfish, probably as a result of seeing them on the local news this year after they had performed (for a second year) at the New York State Fair. I listened to and enjoyed Cracked Rear View (reviewed here!), so I decided to continue on with their library and I picked up Fairweather Johnson.

While nowhere near as commercially successful as Cracked Rear View, Fairweather Johnson had "Tucker's Town" and "Old Man & Me," which received a decent amount of airplay at the time. Fairweather Johnson seems to have most all of the essential aspects of a noteworthy album, save the spark. This is an album that is remarkably average pop-rock with the net effect of the presentation being to leave the listener in a state of "okay, fine." In other words, there aren't the hooks, the anthems, the strong singles to move the album and speak so directly to the listener and as a result, the overall album is rather average, sounding like . . . well, the sophomore album of a garage band.

In fact, as I continued to write my review, I found myself less and less impressed with the album. It is a perfectly average album with few remarkably lyrics, instrumentals that are bland and lack a single melody that makes a song soar and vocals that are too often mumbled. I didn't hate the album with anything active or loathsome, but after so many spinnings of the disc, while I was reviewing it, I just kept being bored by it.

With fourteen tracks, clocking in at 49:31, Fairweather Johnson is written and performed by the men of Hootie & The Blowfish. The quartet wrote all of the songs, they play most of the instruments heard and Darius Rucker provides the lead vocals for the tracks. The only thing the group does not do is produce the album. Still, it does seem like it is largely their musical vision.

After nine listens to the album, I think the best way to describe the sound of the songs on Fairweather Johnson is to compare them to "Time." On Cracked Rear View, the single "Time," which had Darius Rucker presenting lead vocals that tend to be emotive, but not always articulate, is very much what the songs on this album sound like. Songs like "Tucker's Town" and "She Crawls Away" have virtually the same growling vocals as moments of Rucker's presentation on "Time."

But the songs have similar backing vocals and somewhat generic instrumentals supporting them that "Time" had. Comparatively, Fairweather Johnson is like a collection of stylistically similar, lyrical variations on "Time." This is not to say that the album is bad, but it does become monotonous without anything strongly contrasting to shake up the album. But Fairweather Johnson, more than the debut album, relies on Rucker's vocals and supporting vocals over instrumental melodies to carry the album.

One finds themselves wishing, then, that all of the vocals would be clear. However, on songs like "She Crawls Away," Rucker mumbles and growls when he is not letting his voice be smooth and natural. At points, it sounds like he is singing around marbles. For example, when he sings "How can I say you're needing me now / When I've got a plan / I know you don't understand why my heart is sorry now / I believe / We see her laying with another / She runs around you and then it's like the sun goes down and she crawls / I believe / We see her waiting with another / She runs around me and then it's like the sun goes down and he crawls away again" ("She Crawls Away") it is so garbled that I had to look up the lines to figure out what he was singing, even after multiple listens.

What makes Fairweather Johnson ultimately worth listening to, though, is that some of the songs are interesting enough to enjoy over and over again. For example, "So Strange" is a little musical story with its lines like "It's so hard to breathe right now / Living things without a friend of mine / Air just filling every bit, of every end, of every mind / You thought you could feel / And it's maybe 6 a.m. / And no one wants to be with me / So I'm calling out to someone and something that I don't know so well / Ohh, I'm free / If I can't find the warmth in my summer" The song has a loose, swaying quality to it and it paints a picture that is vivid and intriguing with its lines. Hootie & The Blowfish seems to be masters of the melancholy and even their concept of being free is being dragged down with memories that are oppressive.

Indeed, the lyrics are not bad - even when they are presented in such a murky way - as evidenced by songs like "Honeyscrew." Never a single, the song sings about a monstrous man who has a rather abusive relationship with women. It is almost a musical short story, opening with the lines "Feel me dealing / Holding on to a story just told / About a man who's the life of a funeral / Grabbing on to a woman who's soul / He just stole for a dream he don't believe in / Now she sits and she yells for a smile / "Don't let the sun make me feel lonely" / Oh let me in . . ." ("Honeyscrew"). Lyrically, the story song has a deeply empathetic protagonist who is desperately trying to rescue the woman who is the subject of the song. It's sweet, actually.

It must be hard coming off such a success like Cracked Rear View and my instinct is to go light on Hootie & The Blowfish; the pressure to make a worthy follow-up must have been incredible. Instead of trying to top their debut, though, they seem determined to avoid hooks like the simplicity of crying out "Hold My Hand" or "Let Her Cry!" Lacking that, Fairweather Johnson almost attempts to remake Hootie & the Blowfish as an anonymous light pop-rock band and that lack of distinction is carried through the entire album. At least they don't degenerate into simply singing about themselves.

The best track is "So Strange," the weakest link is "Tootie," which is utterly unmemorable.

For other Artist Of The Month reviews, please visit my reviews of:
Hotter Than July - Stevie Wonder
Seal (2) – Seal
It Ain’t Easy: Essential Recordings - Wilson Pickett

5/10

For an organized listing of my music reviews, please visit my Music Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2013, 2008 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
| | |

Even Subtle Christian Undertones Don't Spoil Cracked Rear View By Hootie And The Blowfish!

The Good: Good vocals, Decent lyrics, Fun instrumentals
The Bad: Short, A few weaker tracks/lines
The Basics: Simple and fun, Cracked Rear View reminds the listener just how fun lines about misery can truly be!


Some part of me fantasizes - occasionally - about having regular readers who follow my many reviews who might see me going through an artist's repertoire and when I near the end of it say, "I wonder who W.L. will get immersed in next?" After a few days of trudging through the works of Massive Attack, I was in the mood for something fun. So, I returned to my late high school and early college days and the music of Hootie and the Blowfish. It's about time I actually listened to some of their c.d.s. So, I started at the beginning with Cracked Rear View.

So, there are two observations I have right off the bat with Cracked Rear View: it still rocks in a light, fun, pop-rock way and how do we define "Christian rock?!" I ask this latter question because god and angels pop up on a number of tracks (sure, angels appear in the Old Testament, but it seems the Evangelicals and not so much the Jews run around talking about angels in their lives) and there are a number of popular Christian Rock artists who try to go mainstream by putting out singles that don't highlight their Christian Rock emphasis, but then stick that track on an album that is largely CR - LifeHouse, I'm looking at you! Yeah, if it wasn't for No Name Face (reviewed here!) I probably wouldn't be so sensitive about it. But Hootie And The Blowfish does seem to have a much more spiritual side to it. Perhaps, I'll just consider this "subtle Christian undertones" (in the words of Robot Chicken), shrug and accept that there is no real agenda to songs like "Running From An Angel" and "I'm Goin' Home." After all, it takes some serious staying power with a song to get me to sing (terrible voice!) yet when I began spinning Cracked Rear View, I was filled with a wholesome sense of happiness the moment "Hold My Hand" began. Good times, good times.

With only eleven (and a tiny bit more) tracks, clocking in at 46:45, Cracked Rear View made for a pretty impressive debut by Hootie And The Blowfish, a quartet of men from Columbia, South Carolina who rocked the pop-rock world in the mid-nineties with a very simple, direct, vocally-driven sound that resonated with virtually everyone who heard them. Cracked Rear View had four radio-played successful singles and made Darius Rucker a household name for a time. All four men are credited with the writing on the album, Rucker provides lead vocals and the members all play instruments. As well, supporting vocals are essential to songs like "Hannah Jane" and "Hold My Hand," so it's not like the group slouches just because Rucker takes lead vocals! The only creative aspect the band is not credited with on this album is in the production department. Still, it is hard to argue that this is not their musical vision.

And largely, it's a very successful, enjoyable musical vision for anyone who likes pop-rock. The songs are guitar, bass, drum tracks with deep vocals from Darius Rucker. Rucker sings clearly, often supported by the other band members with vocals that sound like well-practiced a cappella group with instruments (yes, I know a cappella is without instruments, but that level of synchronisity that an a cappella group has is often lacking from garage bands). Instrumentally, the songs tend to be simple pop-rock tunes with catchy tunes, memorable refrains and strategic crescendos.

Lyrically, Hootie And the Blowfish had all of the elements for a successful album with their largely feel-good lyrics. No, it's not that, because reading their lyrics, Cracked Rear View is a morbid collection of songs about young love torn apart by parents ("Look Away"), emotional manipulation ("Let Her Cry") and being ravaged by age ("Time"). There are songs about the destructive nature of racism ("Drowning") and losing love ("Goodbye"), so it's not that the lyrics are at all feel-good. But Hootie and the Blowfish make terrible themes and wrenching lines sound oh-so-good.

So, when we hear "Yesterday, I saw you standing there / Your head was down, your eyes were red / No comb had touched your hair / I said get up, and let me see you smile / We'll take a walk together / Walk the road awhile, 'cause / 'Cause I've got a hand for you / I've got a hand for you / 'Cause I wanna run with you / Won't you let me run with you? yeah / Hold my hand" ("Hold My Hand") we almost forget that the narrator never gets his satisfaction. "Hold My Hand" is one person crying out to let them rescue the other, but the other never responds. At the end of the song, the musical narrator is standing, hand outstretched waiting to support, but we never find out if the subject of that desire turns and takes the hand! Anyone with experience knows that you can love someone to death; it's nothing if they don't reciprocate or let you act upon it.

Even Hootie and the Blowfish know this! This is why they had a number one hit with "Let Her Cry!" It's impressive how such a wrenching song could be so successful, but one supposes the band received a royalty for every breakup that occurred in 1994 and 5. It's easy to see how the song has endured as it has with lines like "This morning I woke up alone / Found a note standing by the phone / Saying baby, maybe I'll be back someday / I wanted to look for you / You walked in I didn't know just what I should do / So I sat back down and had a beer and felt sorry for myself / Saying let her cry / If the tears fall down like rain / Let her sing / If it eases all her pain / Let her go " ("Let Her Cry"). Yes, it might be a whiny man's anthem, but hey, emotive men are cool and you always know what to buy them (handkerchiefs!). In all seriousness, Hootie and the Blowfish wrote a pretty timeless song for the current generation by speaking to something very necessary, with real articulation: the need to let go when a relationship is emotionally manipulative. Dang, if only I had listened closer before I first got married!

The reason the album holds up so well even now, though, is that the radio-friendly hit tracks are not the only decent ones. I was surprised by the power of "Goodbye." For all of the pop-rhymes and late-teen appeal sentiments, "Goodbye" is just wrenching as a poem: "Tomorrow used to be a day away / Now love is gone and you're into someone far away / I never thought the day would come / When I would see his hand not mine / Holding on to yours because I could not / Find the time / And now I can't deny / Nothing lasts forever / But I don't wanna leave and see the teardrops in your eyes / I don't wanna live to see the day we say goodbye." From the first time I heard that track, I was astonished by the power of this ballad which is raw and emotive and piano-driven in contrast to most of the other tracks.

Part of the reason songs like "Goodbye" work so well is that Darius Rucker can sing! He has a smooth, soulful voice that carries notes with real emotion and clearly articulates the poetry the whole band wrote.

Never has misery been more fun to listen to!

The best track is "Let Her Cry," the low point (which is not very low at all!) is the somewhat unmemorable "Look Away."

For other Artist Of The Month reviews, please check out my reviews of:
Working On A Dream - Bruce Springsteen
Forty Licks - The Rolling Stones
Aladdin Sane - David Bowie

8/10

For other music reviews, please check out my Music Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2013, 2008 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
| | |