I’ve been afraid it would come to this. Just as the past five years have witnessed a veritable clone army of alternative sort-of punk bands march themselves to ubiquity, so the lesser representatives of the second British invasion—the one led by the unfailingly weepy and increasingly blustery Chris Martin—are forcing themselves upon us with such frequency and indistinguishableness that a genre-wide bitch-slap feels in order. The All American Rejects, Boys Like Girls, Red Jumpsuit Apparatus, et al, are what we got for tolerating Yellowcard and that catchy “Ocean Avenue.” And now arrives our just reward for movie-soundtracking Keane and Snow Patrol into their current status as household names and for tolerating The Fray well past market saturation: OneRepublic.

OneRepublic
Dreaming Out Loud
Rating: 4.3/10
Interscope Records, 2007

That is indeed the business of OneRepublic, a group of green balladeers from Colorado that has been catapulted to premature stardom by Timbaland’s remix their song “Apologize” (apparently as part of his “bid to produce every song by every living recording artist“). Their debut, Dreaming out Loud, is catchy and generally likable, if at times obnoxiously inane and astoundingly derivative. I don’t much believe in giving A’s for effort, but these guys definitely try as hard as the next bunch of twenty-somethings who might be vying to share with us their inspiring accumulations of wisdom, perhaps revealing confessions that “like a bone, like a bone, I’m so breakable.”

The first real single, “Chasing Cars”—whoops, I mean “Stop and Stare”—is roundly representative: huge, plodding, and pretty, but more than a little boring and more than a little like certain songs we’ve all heard before. (Not to mention the painfully pseudo-introspective lyrics like, “I’m staring down myself, counting up the years…”)

“Say (All I Need)” fares better, being introduced by a tumble of overlapping, Enyaesque synthesized voices and tricked up by pace-shifting rhythms (a more Timberlake-like drum machine at the beginning, and militaristic post-rock drumming at the climax). But. But. I’m really sorry, but I just can’t tolerate such beautiful bluster as the background for sentiments like, “Bless my soul, you’re a lonely soul!” and “Well, all I need is the air I breathe.” The former would lead one to believe frontman Ryan Tedder studied lyricism under Iron Sea-era Tom Chaplin, the latter under Marie Barnett.

OneRepublic comes the closest to sounding like its own band on “Tyrant,” which uses a minor key (which misfired on “Goodbye, Apathy”) and forgoes a little of the polish for some rock grit. Tilting toward the Muse end of the Brit-rock spectrum, Tedder gets some growl in his voice, the guitar riffs howl and slide, and the piano gets darker and more substantive.

“Mercy,” while sounding so much like a masked Christian rock song that Rolling Stone picked up on it, could have come directly off How to Save a Life. It’s good, but only in the sense you mean when you say a Fray song is “good”: quite catchy, but also quite forgettable. And over and over on this record, that’s OneRepublic’s biggest problem. They are completely (and by that I mean absolutely, utterly) indistinguishable. Ryan Tedder is a good but not a unique singer, and his vocal work ends up coming off like that of the Idol diva clones: they’re all amazing, but at some point, we lose the ability to tell them apart. And when that’s paired with instrumentation that’s completely borrowed from bands more famous than this one will ever be, it’s a lose-lose situation.