Call & Response, Nightflight

This may be the only album I've ever bought because I heard its music played on The Real World. I forget what season it was, but I'm thinking Hawaii, which was the last season I really watched, mostly because all of the subsequent cycles have featured increasingly vapid and terrible characters who only want to drink and hook up and fight and get arrested. Hawaii had Ruthie, who fit that bill, and terrible Amaya, who was a big ol' waste of space, but there were some eminently watchable people: Teck, who was the best kind of impulsive; Kaia, the moody schemer; and Justin, the manipulative prodigy. Basically, the cast wasn't as predictable as the following seasons have been.

Call and Response's album is pretty monotone. Fortunately, that single note is this: happy. When I put this on, I was fighting traffic, and for the first few tracks, I felt happier. I wasn't fighting traffic; I was collaborating with other cars to get closer to our destinations. The music is lightweight and innocuous. The lyrics are supremely unimportant. You have to smile when you listen; it's a Pavlovian response.

That said, it gets old quickly. Two of the songs started with minor chords and/or ominous sounds, and I was hopeful that Call and Response had some range, but no such luck — the breezy qualities quickly returned. There's a certain unsustainable naiveté that bubble gum albums like this produce, and it's not particularly becoming. You want some difference, some conflict from track to track.