4 out of 5

Label: EMI

Produced by: Dave Fridmann

Seriously, you’d never have guessed the band would have gotten here.  Certainly the madness surrounding the videos from the previous release was a flash in the pan; the band made a splash and then would fail on their next outing, over-reaching, over-indulging, while trying to copy previous successes.

And… no.  The group’s video inventiveness was only a component of their act.  While some of the pop chops on ‘Oh No’ got a bit repetitive, and lead singer Damian Kulash’s lyrics never quite stretched beyond easy rhymes, the disc stands up to repeated listens – and return listens.  It’s a damned catchy pop rock disc.  The Rube Goldberg video that gave ‘Of the Colour’ its big exposure was an insane leap forward: instead of lost behind the gloss of Dave Fridmann, the group used his skills to fuzz and clatter things up, all of the beats and pieces that single (‘This Too Shall Pass’) adding appropriate shine to the moving-on theme of the song and album.  And yes, the video is stunning, but it only served as a partner to the track, which is as catchy as anything on ‘Oh No’ but with a bit more reserve and patience.  So it goes for most of the disc, which also features the wonderfully tweaked opener ‘WTF?’ – horrible title aside, it’s got a devastating kick to it – and ‘Needing / Getting,’ a maybe breakup song that has Kulash reaching into somewhat bleaker lyrical territory for one of the fuzziest, most passionate, and memorable songs on the disc.  As we get into the Prince-y funk of ‘Skyscrapers’ (a frequent comparison for ‘Colour’s sound, thanks to Kulash’s adaptation of a falsetto and more of a focus on groove than rock), the album enters a bit of a lull, playing with dancier pop that only highlights Damian’s rather simplistic lovey lyrics, but we recover on the quirky ‘Before the Earth Was Round’,’ and a couple tracks later, ‘Back From Kathmandu’ ushers the toe-tapping anthems back in.  I got in on the ground floor this time, digging on the album quite a bit prior to the majority of the videos being released, so it was quite wonderful to see the group’s creativity continue to find new expression in the vids, which maybe shared one-shot or choreographed ethics, but were never explicitly copies of one another.  With each of these singles, I would be re-inspired to listen to the album again, now enhanced with awesome memories of whatever dance routine or inventive visuals the band had committed.

It’s just a pop disc, yes, but OK Go were one of the leading groups into the frontier of a post-label world (the disc would be re-released on the group’s own label soon after it came out), inciting a wonderful sense of crowd-funded support and camaraderie.  And this connection just ripples through the album.  It’s really a pretty awesome success story of exposure actually bringing out the best in a band, giving them an outlet for a whole bunch of stored-up creativity.  And we get to reap the benefits.