AJR Deliver Another Masterpiece with New Album "OK ORCHESTRA"
There is an innate danger in following up a successful album. What if the next one flops? Do we have to cater to the same fans that loved the last one? What if we want to try something new?
There’s so many factors: How old is the group? How long are the albums? Is this an EP? Have we toured the last one long enough? WHAT IF THERE’S A F***ING GLOBAL PANDEMIC THAT BRINGS EVERYTHING TO A SCREECHING HALT?!?
I have good news and bad news. The bad news is that there is a global pandemic that, although seemingly winding down, has thoroughly rocked the entire music industry for the last year or so. The good news is that AJR’s fourth studio album, OK ORCHESTRA, is amazing.
Image courtesy of StereoGum // StereoGum.com
The group, consisting of brothers Adam, Jack and Ryan Met from Queens, NY, dropped their junior album Neotheater in 2019, describing it as a coming of age story about navigating your 20’s and having no idea what is going on at any given moment. Understandably, this message struck a chord with people in their late teens to early twenties, as well as everyone who has no idea what’s going on at any given moment. Combine that with musical experimentation that resulted in some genius mixing by the trio, and you get AJR’s first U.S. Top 10 album.
I, like everyone else, listened to Neotheater religiously as I navigated my late teens and early twenties. So, when they announced OK Orchestra I’ll admit I was skeptical that they would be able to hit the nail quite so squarely on the head a second time.
OK ORCHESTRA is Neotheater, two years, one pandemic, a couple hundred shots of Hennessey and - hopefully - three successful relationships later. It’s a masterpiece.
The four lead singles off of OK ORCHESTRA are, in order of release, “Bang!,” “Bummerland,” “My Play” and “Way Less Sad;” all three feel like huge, bombastic pop hits, while tangling with incredibly intimate feelings. This sets the tone for the entire album; walls of noise crumbling one after the other in new and brilliant ways to reveal ordinary(ish) people with ordinary(ish) feelings, battered and bruised and bearing their souls to anyone who’s willing to listen. AJR went through this past year right along with everyone they made this album for, and OK ORCHESTRA is an active celebration of that connection.
“Humpty Dumpty'' and “Ordinary(ish) People'' deal with isolation in a crowd. “3 O’Clock Things” is a masterfully mixed laundry list of everything you think about at 3 in the morning, when you should definitely be asleep. “The Trick'' is a beautiful, hopeful, slow(ish) song that features an incredibly unsettling falsetto-auto-tuned Ryan Met in every verse. It shouldn’t work, but it totally does. Every song is more honest, more personal, and 100 times weirder than the last. It points unforgivingly to the events of the last year, yet feels like an escape. The trumpets calm your brain, which trumpets never do. Not every song is a winner, but none of them are skips. There’s isolation followed by immediate overstimulation. The instruments sound like they’re speaking, and the singer sounds like a kazoo. OK ORCHESTRA laughs in the face of the oxymoron. Hundreds of thousands of millions of people are feeling a bit more heard with each play of every song as they drift into their headphones, alone.
AJR knows exactly what they’re doing when they put pen to paper - or when they call up the Blue Man Group to play percussion. I say the longer they do it, the better.