The Stolen Records are a five piece party band from Boston. They make no claim to producing anything more than good time social music. The focus on the upbeat is summed up in their press release : "[they] don't want you to think to hard but to simply live in the moment".
They describe their sound as combining elements of indie, punk, power pop, rock, ska and reggae. This kind of genre hopping in the name of existential bliss could be viewed as a healthy disregard for arbitrary musical boundaries but here it smacks of musical tourism, throwing a range of elements together with no deep attachment to any one style.
There are 17 tracks in all including four brief tunes they call 'dub interludes'.
A particular low is hit on the last of these (Divorce Dub) which features a deeply embarrassing voiceover explaining why expenditure on jewellery and disruptions to a golfing schedule make a marriage non viable. This track then lurches from dub rhythms to cod-calypso before thankfully fading out abruptly.
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Elsewhere the blatant superficiality of songs like 'Being Useless Is Useful' and cringeworthy lyrics like "Here in my room there's a song that I sing, makes me feel happy and forget bad things" (on 'Ok') would be excusable only if delivered with a modicum of irony.
They try (too) hard to be likeable but the more I listened to the album the more irritated I became. Emphasising the affirmative is all very well but sadly the songs in this collection just end up sounding lightweight and characterless.
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