Jazz for people who aren't interesting enough to like jazz. Or maybe jazz for people who discovered their love for jazz in the lounge of a hotel full of Weinstenites pretending to be classy. I find absolutely none of this compelling. This was clearly meticulously put together, but the end result is a sterile and soulless product. There are a lot of cinematic elements at play that somehow double down on the adult contemporary cliches that litter the record. When I listen to this, I don't hear passion. What I hear is a group of people who don't care about music with a lot of music training putting out an album that they've been told is right. If this was released shortly after Revolver, I could chalk up how bloated it is to hopping on the strings bandwagon, but since this was released in 2014, I get to call this album unnecessarily pompous. The piano serves as the grounding for a lot of the record but in a formulaic and boring way. This is the musical equivalent of The Da Vinci Code: a well-produced, star-studded sleeping pill that takes itself too seriously to spend time on being interesting.
Things that I did like:
The dreamy interlude on Map to the Treasure about 3 minutes in
Rickie Lee Jones' voice (even if the song was ass)
The two and a half second nod to Webern at the end of Stoned Soul Picnic
Some of the piano runs on Gibsom Street
The fact that someone most likely wrote the lyrics to Save the Country without an inkling of irony
It's cool if you like this album man, but I'm genuinely shocked that you're surprised that we're reacting so poorly to such a trite record. This doesn't even function well as background music. 1/10
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Studies show that when a given norm is changed in the face of the unchanging, the remaining contradictions will parallel the truth.
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