Earlier this year, Oklahoma City band The Uglysuit was signed to Touch and Go Records’ imprint, Quarterstick. Since then, their single “Chicago” has littered music blogs and a significant amount of hype has been built up around the band. While on the surface this appears to be great news for the Oklahoma music scene, but it seems the band’s success is mostly undeserved.
If there is one word that describes The Uglysuit’s self-titled debut, it’s boring. Painfully so, as the album’s nine tracks all blend together to form an unremarkable, uninteresting and forgettable mess.
The reverb-heavy ambient pop leans far too much towards the ambient side of things and winds up droning on aimlessly. The single, “Chicago,” is catchy enough on its own, but when placed within the context of the album, it loses much of its steam.
The band is clearly able to write a solid pop song, but they just don’t seem to be focused on doing so. Instead, they seem to be focused on long, meandering instrumental passages that never go anywhere.
For much of the album, lead vocalist Israel Hind-man seems half-asleep, and it wouldn’t be a surprise if it were the band’s music that put him in that state.
As uninteresting as most of these songs are, the band members themselves sound just as uninterested to be playing them. They seem to carry a very nonchalant “yup, these are our songs, but we don’t really care” attitude through most of the disc’s runtime.
It’s not until the second to last song, “Happy Yellow Rainbow,” that the band achieves anything noteworthy. The second half of this track is noisy, epic and stands out as the best moment on the record. It’s a shame that the band did not spend more time working out that side of their sound.
If you’re looking for a solid example of Oklahoma music success, skip The Ugly-suit’s debut and check out Evangelical’s “The Evening Descends” instead.
