The Musicgoer: The Sounds' Crossing The Rubicon

THE SOUNDS
Crossing the Rubicon
(Original Signal)
** (out of 5)

One terrific song can earn a band a lot of goodwill, enough to get you through 10 or 20 mediocre ones. Case in point: Swedish neo-New Wavers The Sounds, whose “7 Days a Week,” from their 2003 debut album Living in America, became one of my mixtape staples for the next three years. So peppy! So refreshingly unironic! Coming up with another song just as wonderful ought to be a snap, right?

Well, maybe it’s harder than it looks: even with Fountains of Wayne’s Adam Schlesinger — a man who knows his way around a pop hook — helping them out on three of the tracks, their third album Crossing the Rubicon has little of the old magic. Instead, we get one overlong, unfocused song after another, the frequent lyrical references to violent relationships and political oppression at odds with the glossy music. The best melody is probably “Home Is Where Your Heart Is,” but the song is undone by the trite sentiment and muddled images like “Summer rain in my face like snowflakes falling from space.” (Why snowflakes? Why not raindrops?)

But hope springs eternal: I’ll still be there, fingers crossed, when they release album #4.