I frequently get asked questions by some readers about what constitutes a certain album being featured on this recurring part of the website and honestly, I don’t know. I guess part of it is being able to tell a compelling story since my medium is more or less restricted to text and external links, but there’s more to it than that.
I can never cover The Orwells by The Orwells because even though that album is in fact a disaster I don’t think I can tell the story in a way that doesn’t somehow prop them up in a certain light, and if you want to know why I won’t do that despite being a fan of some of their work then go google it for yourself and be prepared to get real sad real fast.
I have considered tackling Revelation: Revolution ’69 by The Lovin’ Spoonful because wow that one is beyond bad but there’s not much out there about the album and it’s not really a compelling album to write about anyway. Here, I’ll sum it up; “lead singer and songwriter John Sebastian leaves the band, drummer and occasional singer Joe Butler takes over vocal duties and leaves the writing to songwriting teams, it’s underwhelming at best and the band breaks up.” See? Didn’t need a whole article to tell you that.
I can’t even really write about Philosophy of the World by The Shaggs even though that one seems like the most dead-to-rights Albums feature, and a perfect underhand pitch that’s slow and straight down the middle, but because of the weird afterlife it has had where it’s gone on to become a cult classic that in many ways leads to the band reuniting for a one-off special at MASS MOCA a few years back because Frank Zappa had to run his fucking mouth, I can’t cover it. Shame, really.
So why this album? Why this band?
You know… for a long time I really liked Fitz and the Tantrums. And then I didn’t. I haven’t thought about them in a long time and then I came across a tweet on my feed that perfectly encapsulated why I stopped paying attention to them. It’s so cringey in how it tries to pull off a weird promotional effort for whatever their latest stupid thing is these days while also completely ignoring how tone-deaf it comes off in the current sociopolitical climate. It’s the first time I’d thought about them and it’s because I had to absolutely recoil at the sight of this video.
So with that said…
Fuck it, I’m calling time on Fitz and the Tantrums.
Todd In The Shadows covered Crash by The Human League on his TRAINWRECKORDS series about disastrous career-ending albums, and in it he cites how in spite of it containing their biggest hit, the #1 single “Human,” it was also the album that ultimately leads to their downfall. The same argument could be made of many records, notably Liz Phair’s self-titled album from 2003, where she tanked her indie cred for popstar aspirations and while it yielded a hit single it also was the end of anyone really caring about Liz Phair (though now we’ve all come around and admitted that the album is perfectly fine). What do Fitz and the Tantrums have in common with these folks that even puts them in that same boat?
Well, before we can fully get into that, let’s get into who these guys even were before this album dropped and ruined us, because who they were varied from year to year. The year this whole thing really starts is 2008, a young man named Michael Fitzpatrick starts writing songs on this organ he gets from an ex-partner and eventually he starts a band with a couple of strikingly talented musicians; drummer John Wicks, bassist Joseph Karnes, saxophone player James King, backing/second vocalist Noelle Scaggs, and keyboardist Jeremy Ruzumna. This band eventually signs with indie label Thunderbird Records and puts out their debut album Pickin’ Up The Pieces which contains a somewhat-big hit in the form of “MoneyGrabber,” a goddamn banger of Motown-influenced soul. The album itself is, in my opinion, pretty damn good too. It really hits this nice cross-section of soul, Motown, and pop, though notably it’s a record that does not feature a lick of guitar on it. Seriously, that’s pretty impressive that they managed to gain the success they did like that and there’s nothing in there for a guitar player to come in on. They would end up opening for The Specials on their reunion tour, wind up on some national TV spots including Jimmy Kimmel and Jimmy Fallon, play a lot of the big-name music festivals for up-and-coming bands, and would even play on the show Darryl’s House featuring Darryl Hall of Hall and Oates fame, whom Fitzpatrick got a lot of comparisons to early-on with his singing voice. Elsewhere the band’s star continued to rise in other less-known ways; for example, did you know James King played on this song? Yeah, that saxophone solo at the end is all him, and that’s a song that has gotten universal acclaim, has ultimately stood the test of time and is well on its way to being a goddamn classic if I must say so myself. Okay, the first album does well enough to top the Heatseekers chart and your saxophone player is now embedded in the musical canon whether you like it or not, what next?
On their second album More Than Just A Dream they not only got promoted to Elektra Records but they also upped the ante a lot by going in on adding some new wave influences to that cross-section of sounds they’d cultivated within the 3 years between albums. It featured some guitars and relied more heavily on synthesizers for parts of it, but those are still Fitz and the Tantrums songs deep down. For every “Spark” or “The Walker” where they were clearly trying to get on pop radio and grab a hit (which they did for “The Walker” by the way) they also had songs like “House on Fire,” “6AM,” and “Fools Gold” where, yeah the production values increased a little bit, but they still sounded like the same band. Two of the three singles from that album ended up getting them platinum records and the album itself peaked at #26 on the US Billboard Charts, but critics were less interested in it compared to their first record which received a lot of positive critical reviews when it came out. Even now some folks still ask “why this record?” and ponder why they chose to go chasing pop hits when they could’ve easily gained a more sustained albeit different brand of success if they stuck along their own road, but there’s more coming 3 years down the line.
In interviews with the band around the time their third album came out, the band said they attempted to “find that magical thing” in their music that made them who they are and admitted to the band being an ever-evolving group that didn’t have a consistent “sound,” and that their third record was going to be more about the success they experienced going into said third record. There’s no point in shadowboxing yourself when you’re in a band that’s on the rise and have all the best stuff in the world heading your way.
In June of 2016 Fitz and the Tantrums have come out with their third album, simply a self-titled effort. I guess I’m not a huge fan of bands self-titling any record of theirs after their first one (…YOU HEAR ME, WEEZER?) for what can only be described as a whole list of weird personal reasons but Fitzpatrick stood firm on his reasoning of why they ultimately went this route, saying…
“By having a self-titled album, it’s kind of like putting our stake in the ground, claiming our identity completely. We know who we are and that is a band that can take chances by taking all different genres and putting them together. We’re not going to be reducible to one genre or one stereotype, so for us it was a proclamation of our own confidence in our sound and what we do.”
-Michael Fitzpatrick, The Aquarian interview (2016)
Okay, you know what? Ballsy, but I can respect that. A band that jumped around with different sounds on their first two albums and kinda confusing some folks in the process is claiming “this is who we are” and sticking with it. Bold indeed. So what does the new Fitz ad the Tantrums sound like? What have they chosen to stake their claim in? Well… they chose to kick off their self-titled third album with the opening single “HandClap,” and if you’ve been living under a rock and haven’t heard it at all since it came out, allow me to introduce you to it. It’s June 2016 and you go find the new album on whatever respective streaming service you’re into, and you hear that this is how we open up their third album.
Holy shit that sounded like absolute garbage. Like… holy shit what the fuck is going on with this song?? That saxophone line sounds bad, the riff it relies on isn’t any good either, and there’s really nothing good to grab onto here. There’s also Fitz’s psuedo-rap he’s doing on the verses and it’s… (don’t say cringe, don’t say cringe, don’t say cringe) …not great. Even that hook with the hand claps is not really a strong sentiment to build a song around. I sent this to a friend years ago when it came to talking about bands we thought “sold out” and when I brought this song up he said something to the effect of “I’ve never heard of these guys and they sound like they’re trying way too hard to write a hit. It sounds like garbage.” Telling him how far the band hand fallen was a depressing conversation.
In short my reaction upon first hearing it when it first came out in 2016 was “what. the. fucking. fuck?” but I can admit that I might just be a bit of a nasty critic towards this song though. In fact, the general public liked it enough to make it go 4x platinum in America and hit #53 on the Billboard charts and #2 on the US Alternative charts. Though maybe it is still just me being a nasty critic, that doesn’t seem like a whole lot considering all they changed up to get there, right? And for the record, it’s their highest-charting single. It didn’t even hit the top 40, but you’re certainly gonna hear it at every single sporting event from now until whenever people finally decide this song is no longer cool to use like that.
Okay, so that’s the first impression of the album, what’s next?
Well… it’s “Complicated.” And it features a truly horrible hook in
“It’s complicated when we get naked. But I can take it.”
Fitz and the Tantrums, “Complicated” (2016)
…they really just took the cringiest thing they could find a threw it into the MAIN HOOK didn’t they? And yeah, I know, it’s rich coming from a drummer/singer in a band that mostly just tells dick jokes in their songs, but FITZ AND THE TANTRUMS ARE NOT THAT KINDA BAND. And that’s saying nothing about the music which, once again, features this really cold, bland backing track that’s mostly driven by a drum machine and a few synths. Fitz and the Tantrums were cool when they were mixing the synths and live band stuff on their second album because it still had the human element to it, and it fucking worked, this doesn’t in really any stretch of the imagination. There’s really close to nothing going for this song, so to have it up near the very front of the record following one of your biggest singles is ballsy.
I almost didn’t want to continue, but I did. And incidentally the next song was probably titled after my reaction to the first two tracks, it’s called “Burn It Down.”
Okay, this one is nice, it starts with a nice little piano riff and has that classic Fitz feel to it, and Noelle’s vocals add some nice backup.
aaaaaaaaand there go the electric drum kits again trying to do these vaguely outdated dubsteppy fills. And the vocal manipulations to make it sound all skippy. Is the rest of this song bad?
Okay, the second verse comes in and it’s not as bad as it is at the start, Noelle gets the lead and she has a beautiful lead here as the song kinda tones it back a bit. There’s still little electronic flourishes here and there but it’s something much more in place with the second album than not.
Up next is the second single off the album, and one I don’t think I ever heard on the radio, it’s called “Roll Up.” To put it bluntly; this sounds like ass. Actually, it sounds even worse than ass; this sounds like a store-brand version of an Imagine Dragons song. The music video is a cringy little piece too that can basically be summed as “what if phone bad??” Not surprisingly this barely made a blip anywhere; it hit #42 on the US Rock charts and that was it. No certifications anywhere, and certainly not the follow-up to the success of multi-platinum “HandClap” that I’m sure Elektra was hoping for.
“Tricky,” “Fadeback,” and “Run It” follow “Roll Up.” I think the best I can say of pretty much any of these songs is “…eh.”
Is there anything good on this album?
“Get Right Back?” Eh, sounds too much like a bad take on a Britney Spears song.
“Do What You Want?” I kinda like this one, but I think that’s because it reminds me a bit too much of “Safe and Sound” by Capital Cities, and I actually kinda like that one too. There are no guilty pleasures here at ROUGE! HQ.
“Walking Target?” Sounds too much like it’s trying to get play in a Target or Old Navy store. I do like some of the synthesizer choices here but overall it’s not a good song.
The album closes with “A Place For Us.” Much like all the others it’s alright, I guess.
Alright, we’re done here. This album as a whole ranges from boring to particularly bad cringe. Honestly I just don’t think these sounds work too well for this band and maybe that’s just why the album doesn’t work as a whole.
Maybe I’m just a nasty critic, I saw plenty of people who talked about how much they love this album and how much they really liked all the songs on it, so what about the other “nasty critics?” What did they have to say about it?
Well, AllMusic gave it a 3.5/5 star rating, Newsday gave it a B+ rating, and The Courier-Journal gave it a 3/4 star rating, even going so far as to say we’re back in the era where rock bands could have pop hits! Wow, that’s pretty good, right? So maybe this pop gambit paid off because they certainly had some good praise there.
…wait, hang on, I found all the other reviews.
ooooooh boy this is bad.
Consequence of Sound? D.
PopMatters? 4/10.
Rolling Stone? 2/5, even opening up their review by saying “Fitz and the Tantrums have lost their soul — literally.” The rest of that review is also particularly harsh at times so reader please be advised on that front.
There’s no actual rating system anywhere to be found for this one but Spectrum Culture didn’t have anything nice to say about it either, with this choice quote being “the combination of frenzied instruments tripping over each other and a heaping pile of useless lyrics leads to something that lacks listenability.”
Spill Magazine gave it a 1/5 star review, and said “the biggest qualm that exists with this record is that it isn’t just a sellout, but it’s an unimpressive sellout. If the tunes at least had some sense of artistry attached to them, there would be no need to so cruelly dismantle this effort. However, the cheesy ‘oh oh’s and terribly arranged vocal effects all crash and burn throughout the entire 11-track duration.”
The big one that came from The 405 (which is down now, but some websites have saved bits and pieces of the review) which stated, “I tried listening to this record in as many different ways as possible — sitting, standing, running, dancing, brain turned on, brain turned off. No mode of listening could redeem the fact that this album is just bad … Each and every track on this album is so jam-packed with garbage pop flourishes that it can get exhausting.”
Exhuasting is the proper adjective to describe the album, too. I was actually somewhat worried that despite having a few months to write this one out I wasn’t gonna get it done in time because the album truly is just exhausting in just about every sense of the word and trying to write about it feels like a chore. If you chose to listen along to the album as you read this article, I truly apologize for doing that to you.
The aftermath of the album wasn’t particularly notable because the album itself also wasn’t particularly notable either. They did an album 3 years later and even have a new album coming out this month, but when you go and look at their chart history it feels like any pop momentum they could’ve gained was immediately lost on them. Fitz and the Tantrums were never the sorta band that could terrorize the pop charts in any country to begin with, but their songs have only ever hit the US Rock charts. A lot of critics in their harsher reviews all stated that this was probably the album that was going to kill their relevance as a musical act, and honestly I’d say as much as well. Maybe taking a page out of the playbook of Pat Monahan (of Train), Michael Fitzpatrick would go on to do a solo record in 2021 and I literally just found that out during the research for this review which should, in theory, say all sorts of things about the band and how their relevancy was more or less killed by this album, even with their new album on the way I have heard absolutely nothing about it whatsoever that wasn’t found out by me poking and prodding around at what these guys have been up to lately.
In a way it’s actually pretty fucking sad; a band that had one of the better Motown revival sounds of the 2010s decides to go pop and instead crashes and burns so hard that it kills any and all momentum they could’ve possibly had. It didn’t have to be this way either, they could’ve easily stayed the course and had the sort of longevity that comes from a band that gains a hardcore cult following and they would’ve eventually broken out on their own accord that way and gotten success through that avenue as well. Instead they try to go directly for radio hits and dumbing down their lyrics to lowest-common-denominator status and hoping it was “relatable” enough, and while the short-term success was good for the band it ultimately would be their last taste of actual success. I guess in the end that’s just how it was always going to work out. The only other thing I can say about Fitz and the Tantrums is, “wow, that Hall and Oates album really fucking sucked.”
This is Harvey VD reminding you to kick out the ROUGE! motherfuckers. Peace.
ROUGE! Azul Productions 