On the cover of their eighth official album two of the three HANSON brothers are sporting little beards. It’s hardly Paul McCartney burying his puppyish good lucks in a mound of facial fluff to make his Let It Be I’m-taking-charge-here-now-boys-ok! attitude obvious, but it’s apparent we’ve all probably missed what Hanson have been up to.
What they’ve been up to is releasing music independently for around five years now. After creative tensions with Def Jam which saw the label reject a rumoured total of eighty(!) songs from the band, Hanson have been releasing music through their own 3CG label. This DIY approach perhaps explains why Shout It Out is finally being released in the UK over a year after it crept into the Billboard Top 30 and peaked at number 2 in the American Independent Music Charts.
The term DIY has slightly different connotations over here. While we expect a degree of grit and frustrated artistry it appears that selling 15 million records world wide means that you can easily record an album that sounds like a thousand puppies sliding down a rainbow onto a marshmallow bed. It even means you can hire Motown Legend Bob Babbit to play bass on a few tracks. Basically, it means you can have a party!
Not that anyone expected a kind of brooding In Rainbows-style independence from the band that wrote Mmmbop (although interestingly Hanson have covered Kid A’s Optimistic in concert a few times!), but being free from any record company preconceptions actually makes this album feel like three people writing songs in a garage out of pure enjoyment. I fear that Def Jam’s refusal of eighty Hanson songs was probably an attempt to make them sound a bit more like Katy Perry because the songs here are pure classic retro pop. There are hints of the Jackson 5ive, Stevie Wonder, even a bit of The Wailers. It must be frustrating for a label to own the rights to an exceptional song writing team but have them write stuff that wouldn’t get a sniff on mainstream radio at the moment.
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And believe it or not they are exceptional. Of course it’s all a bit song writing by numbers and there’s not a great deal of individual personality here but I’m a reviewer who believes that a song with a well crafted melody can have just as much emotional clout as one that has been howled out by a singer song writer on a blood stained guitar. The choruses here can actually give you butterflies! If you want to dip your toe in start with Waiting For This, Carry You There and Thinking ‘Bout Somethin’. It’s an album that makes no shame in trying to make you dance and smile. It’s an album that’s made me use six exclamation marks in a review of it!
So this is not going to be an album you want to listen to all the time. It may not even be something you’d feel comfortable recommending to your friends. I was even thinking about giving it a ‘lack of uniqueness’ slating before it dawned on me that you can’t argue with the song craft here and that sometimes a great song is all the personality you need. But in the true spirit of pop music, the idea that three minutes of sound can completely transport you somewhere else, it’s absolutely fantastic.
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