The most surprising thing about OK GO's new album isn't the new musical direction they take, but how good it is. I thought that treadmill song was fun and good and everything but the rest of their work sounds like the worst parts of Weezer crossed with most lackluster parts of Eve 6, so it's understandable why fans of the band are a little miffed about their new album sounding like The Flaming Lips crossed with Prince, which are two artists I'm actually pretty much completely unfamiliar with.

White Knuckles, one of the more upbeat and easily accessible tracks on the album, sounds to me kind of like Pavement trying to do a Passion Pit song. It's good, but it's weird how much like other bands it sounds. I guess that's part of OK GO's underlying problem, they always sound like they're trying to sound like something. They never really just sound like themselves, whatever that could be. The more popular album cut, This Too Shall Pass, comes about as close as the band could possibly come to not sounding like another band, but for all I know that's just because I'm not familiar with whatever band that song sounds like.

All in all, I like this album, and I spun it a good seven or eight times straight through. My first listen I felt kind of feh about it, but This Too Shall Pass kept me coming back. I'd say out of the whole album there's maybe three or four "keepers". YMMV.

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