Album Review

One Day Life – Heroes, Hoods and Headphones.

• 25th Feb 2008

There is almost nothing good to say about this witless album.

I try not to be a close-minded reviewer, or indeed, a close-minded listener to music. When someone played me ‘Loveless’ by My Bloody Valentine, I didn’t like it particularly, but people had said that it was ‘good’. So I listened, again, and again, and I drew out the good points and the beauty. I had heard that ‘Illmatic’ by Nas was a classic hip-hop album, and I’m not even a huge hip-hop fan, but I got hold of it and listened, and listened again. It is true: his flow is as smooth as pebbles on a river delta. The bass lines and beats are immaculate. But it took time to get there.

So – I listened to this, and I listened again. And even one more time, to make sure that I wasn’t wrong. I was right. This is a terrible album. It opens with the pop-punk by numbers ‘Caught In The Crossfire’ and rarely strays from this template.

One.day.life style themselves as pop-punk’s rising starts, and S-A-N Promotion, their PR people, list them as suitable ‘for fans of Fall Out Boy, Busted, McFly, Blink 182’. But there is none of Blink 182’s frat boy wit, or Busted and McFly’s sheen. There are grey tunes that all sound the same. There are dead monkeys floating in space with more imagination, and there are people who have spent their lives selling fruit on market stalls that have better harmony and timbre. The lead singer constantly pitches his voice at that note that is de rigeur in these circles – you know, the strained, top of the average vocal range note that is achieved by entirely using the mouth and not your chest. Jeff Buckley would hear this and throw up. They grew up in South-east England but their vocalist sounds like someone trying to do a karaoke version of a bloated, over-the-hill Billy Joe Armstrong. These people are from the South-east, for crying out loud.

None of the tracks stand out – there is so little to differentiate them. The vocals don’t attempt at variety, the melodies don’t attempt to be imaginative and there is even one song that does the requisite 25%-extra-strings rock-anthem routine which belies even further their stab at authenticity. ‘The Dancefloor’ showcases the awful harmonies, as well as a guitar line that sounds like the Deftones put through a band-pass filter and then remixed by a jovial village idiot.

They have built a fan base, and some momentum, with their endless gigging and their ‘street-team’, and I have to applaud bands that put in this amount of time and effort. This album is also self-produced and they show they will not let bad reviews get in their way. But when in the single ‘Warm Glows and White Lies’, ‘can you hear me’ becomes ‘can yeww whear me?’ in the manner of an off-hand Green Day rejoinder, you just know deep down, that they are trying to be something they are not. I did mull over for a long time about whether to write a review this negative, but in the end, this is simply not good enough.