Album title: Ambitions
Artist: One OK Rock
Genre: J-Rock (huh?)
Nationality: Japanese
Release date: January 11
Position in Discography: Eighth
Familiar with this artist? No
Familiar with the genre or subgenre? No
Check out more from this artist? No
Check out more from this genre or subgenre? Maybe
Ah, those crazy Japanese! From Flower Travellin' Band and Dir En Grey to One OK Rock, they sure know how to pick strange names for their bands! Interesting to find that not only do these guys sing in English, it's perfect English too; had I not know they were Asian I would have pegged this as a US release. Catchy opening anyway. No complaints yet. Pretty decent in all fairness. Kind of a Script/Imagine Dragons feel to it. That would normally be a negative for me, and these guys probably don't sound like that at all, but it's all that comes to mind. And I like it. So far. “Hard to Love” is a surprisingly un-cringey ballad, hmm but then “Bedroom Warfare” takes the tone seriously down: I mean, they're using autotune here, the lyric is pretty terrible, and although the tune is catchy it's not particularly good. Almost like a different band has come onto the record. Sigh. Is this where it really begins to dip, or is it a blip on an otherwise half-decent album? Meh, “American Girls” is pretty much as bad, a real throwaway. OK “I Was King” pulls it back a little more on course, but it'll take a lot to erase the memory of those last two songs and convince me there are no more like them waiting to ambush me. Oh. There are. No, I think I'd chalk it off as a bog-level American rock-copy album which occasionally hits gold but most of the time it's kind of iron pyrite, if even that. I can't even use the obvious pun of saying it's One OK Album, cos it really doesn't even quite deserve that much praise.
