DrFaustus's Full Review: Eager To Please * by The Leftovers (Sweden)
When I first heard it, I could have sworn it was an early Elvis Costello track. The nerdy sounding vocals with their staccato delivery and scooping bends on the longer notes, the crunchy pub rock sound of the guitar licks that start with a simple one-note riff before exploding into full-band glory halfway through the first verse, the wry lyrics that cleverly put a spin on the frustrations of love, the pure pop sensibilities mixed with a raw punk attitude, and so much more all pointed to an outtake from the My Aim Is True sessions.
It's not Elvis Costello, though. The song is Telephone Operator, one of the tracks off of Portland, Maine-based trio The Leftovers 2009 album Eager to Please, the fourth full-length release of their career. It was good enough to fool me, though. Well... good enough spur me to a little more investigation into the Leftovers, at least. Before long I had a copy of Eager to Please in my hand and I was eagerly looking forward to more of that retro pub rock sound from Telephone Operator that had hooked me in originally.
What I wasn't expecting was an album mostly full of bland, uninspired pop punk. Of the album's fourteen tracks, at least ten of them are interchangeable in their sound. Eighth note power chord guitar riffs that never let up throughout the whole song? Check. Simple surf rock drum rhythms over and over? Check. Generic "girls are pretty, I wish I could get one" lyrics? Check. Dynamic range compression applied to the mix until the music becomes a dense, mushy, blob? Check. There's nothing in these songs that hasn't already been explored over and over by the likes of Blink 182, Bowling for Soup, Good Charlotte, New Found Glory, and their ilk, not to mention The Ramones who helped to pave the way for all those other bands. The main difference is that those bands have learned the value of musical variety and manage to fit at least a moderate range of songwriting diversity into their albums.
To their credit, the Leftovers draw their influences directly from some top-notch sources (and those influences are worn quite heavily on their sleeves). Apart from the Elvis Costello-esque Telephone Operator, we've got Thinking About Her which echoes the riffs of The Beatles's All My Loving, Make You Mine with its Cars influenced arrangements, plenty of songs that owe a debt of gratitude to the vocal harmonies of The Beach Boys, and even Girlfriend which seems to borrow its main guitar riffs from the traditional Happy Birthday song. It seems, though, that those echoes are less inspired seeds for solid songwriting, and more motions for the band to go through without really understanding what truly made those bands great.
It's almost a shame that I had enjoyed Telephone Operator as much as I originally did. It set the bar awfully high for my expectations, and the rest of the music on Eager to Please, energetic and spirited though it may be, just didn't have the inspired spark to reach that bar. On the plus side, it's always great to be reminded of how fantastic those earlier pop giants whose sound crops up here are, even decades after their original releases. It's time to dig out those old albums and remind myself what real pop mastery is all about.
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