An Office Job To Do

I loved it when RJD2 decided to speak up, um, I mean sing in "Making Days Longer" off of Since We Last Spoke. Yeah, that's right. I didn't mind his sing-speak. I liked it. I loved it. If I were in a band, I would sing-speak. I also loved the idea of him departing from his norm and doing a more pop-oriented album (though, if this were a Serious blog, I would contend to say that everything he's done is Pop. Alas, I am not Serious nor is this blog and it's not like I thought that out before I started typing).

There's the problem: the idea is great. Full of promise. The actual manifestation of it is really not what I hoped he would accomplish. Accomplish is not the word. "Come up with". Listening to it straight-through the three times that I have so far in the past month or so, I feel like Rjd2 could've pushed and then pushed some more to get something not necessarily more polished, but something that's much more focused, more of what we all know he's capable of.

If the breeziness of "Making Days Longer" carried over into The Third Hand, I wouldn't've disliked the album so much. Yes, I disliked it and no one is surprised. Good job at trying, but it just didn't work out. If you're going to sing-speak, do it right. Make it the focus. Make the lyrics, the vocals punchier. Sure, stay restrained but let something peek out. Anything. I bought the album out of sheer curiosity. I listened because I wanted to hear him. But where did he go?

I wholeheartedly believe that one can be timid and present at the same time. He showed us with one breathtaking track and it's there, you know, inside of all of the crud, there's a breathtaking album. The Third Hand feels like a collection of afterthoughts or maybe a rough draft for something that Rjd2 is trying to develop. I'm not sure if the album is, in the grand scheme of his career, a step backward or forward. Maybe it's not a step at all. Maybe it's an extended jump straight up into the air but so far up that the world continued rotating and the poor guy just landed in the middle of the ocean.

...

No mp3 but the randomly found YouTube video is magnificent. Beautiful and minimal. Much like the song, I thought to myself, "I can't believe I actually like this." You could also watch the related videos where Rjd2 performs the song. With a band. And an acoustic guitar. I'm sorry. Really. I apologize. I just can't seem to dig that because I'm a close-minded asshat.