HEY OCEAN!
Stop Looking Like Music
Independent
· Hey Ocean! wants you to know how many different styles of music they can play. Badly.
When you pick up Hey Ocean!’s first full-length album, Stop Looking Like Music, you really want to like this band. Maybe it’s the great band name, or song titles like "The Beat Boxer Who Broke My Heart." Maybe it’s the opening strains of "Turn Up the Stars," which immediately transport you to a beach. Whatever it is that makes you want to like this band, it fades quickly.
Hey Ocean! are a group of world travellers who came together in Vancouver, and their worldliness is everywhere on this album. Every song is rooted in pop, but is infused with a combination of jazz, R&B and awkward hip hop. The first third of the album, is pretty impressive, but as it wears on, every song follows the same pattern in a desperate attempt to show versatility that ironically does the opposite.
The band’s musical missteps are a shame, because clever lyrics and melodies are brushed completely under the rug as you try to understand why the band made such an effort to write rhymes over a flute riff. If Hey Ocean! can rein themselves in next time around, we might be able to like them as much as we want to.
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