Album Review: 3OH!3 - "Streets of Gold"

3OH!3's 3rd album drops tomorrow, but Butler couldn't wait that long and got his hands on a copy of it.  Find out how this Boulder band did after the jump!  

There are a lot of ways people can enjoy music.  It can be judged on its technical merits, its ability to make you want to brutalize everyone around you, whether or not the bass is high enough in the mix to vibrate your taint etc.  In the case of 3OH!3, I always loved their high energy, filthy, goofiness.  Their first two albums were incredibly self-aware, making all kinds of outrageous proclamations such as the listener being "a punk bitch if they don't know 'bout Boulder" going on to comment that the listener's girl is "a freak, cause that's what they told ya".  If you know Boulder, CO, you know precisely why these declarations of it being any variety of "hip" or "fresh" are hilarious.  And that is just the tip of the iceberg in lyrical gems from their first two albums.  The melodies were catchy as hell, and listening to these two skinny white boys act like big tough guys "repping the 303", as if it is a territory that has anything to rep, always brings a smile to my face.  Suffice to say, given that Want dropped over 2 years ago, I've been pretty excited to see what they were going to follow it up with.

My first red flag appeared when their first single dropped.  I've already made it clear that I love it when artists are unabashedly filthy, so at first I thought that Ke$ha being a guest vocalist was a great sign.  2 white boys who declare that they will "hit you from the back and make you holler till you pass out" combined with the singer who just wants you to "show [her] where the dick's at" and advocates sending dirty pictures of yourself to whomever seemed like it would be a filth-stravaganza.  Hell, I even thought that the title "My First Kiss" was probably just ironic understatement.  Then I listened to the song.

Now don't get me wrong: the chorus is pretty undeniably catchy, but hearing the guys who talk about screwing you doggy style with such vigor that you scream and fall unconscious talk about how great kissing is and making comparisons to licorice and candy is pretty indicative of how the album landed for me.  For the most part, the songs are pretty tame, and the duo has lost a lot of their "gangsta" self-awareness in favor of more Hellogoodbye style electronic emo.  This is particularly apparent (read "bad) on the tracks "R,I.P." and "I'm Not The One", both lamenting love lost and how some girl has ruined their lives forever waa waa boo hoo.  Look, I'm not saying that I don't like a little My Chemical Romance every now and then, but the delightful grandiose posturing that really helps define 3OH!3 getting thrown to the wayside in favor of generic relationship-lamenting really pissed me off.

The album definitely isn't all bad though.  The song "House Party" is pretty fantastic, and for me its no coincidence that it's my favorite track on the album, as it extols the virtues of staying home and getting wasted as opposed to going out because "fuck the clubs... fuck the dj's, they ain't playin' my shit".  "See You Go" reminds me a lot of "Don't Trust Me" from Want, but given that the latter was my phone's ringtone for almost a year, I don't consider that all that bad a thing.  a high energy and catchy as hell track from start to finish, and talking about women that they will eventually make conquests of is WHAT I WAS LOOKING FOR.  Rounding out my little trifecta is the closing track, "Love 2012", which closes out the album very similarly to how "Colorado Sunrise" closed out Want.  There's that deep, fuzzy, wavy electronic background that is a staple on their earlier albums (less so here), and a good, slow burn on how they build the song's energy, ending the album on a low-key, but musically tasteful note.

Pictured: more tasteful notes

The above-mentioned gems, however, do little to save the album from the mediocrity padding out the rest of its 45 minute length.  Songs like "I Can Do Anything" , "Deja Vu", and "I Know How To Say" all feel like watered down versions of the song they were meant to be.  Hell "Touchin' On My" actually censors itself in the chorus for no ostensible reason other than that they wanted the song to go on the radio, and few things infuriate me like self-censorship.  

I'm not going to say the band are sellouts, as everyone is in music to make money, so if you are in the industry and charging for anything, you have already "sold out" (plus, it seems that it is a term these days reserved only for the ignorant).  However, the band had essentially two directions they could go with this album: follow the pattern of their less-played, more hilarious tracks and maintain moderate acclaim as an act that is just above the underground but comfortably away from the mainstream, or they could take advantage of the fairly different sound they utilized on the song that got them popular and shoot for upward mobility.  That they are going for a more approachable, radio-friendly sound makes absolute sense from their perspective, but they have done it at the cost of losing the core of what made them a fun band to listen to, leaving us with a kinda catchy, but ultimately hollow, shell of an album.