When did journal entries become acceptable as poetry or advertising copy or song lyrics?
Someone please tell me so I can figure out how someone like Marc Copely got a recording contract.
This 20-something songwriter's debut Limited Lifetime Guarantee is awash in poor lyricism that was no doubt lifted directly from the man's battered, yet banal loose-leaf notebook.
Need a sample? How about this, from "Surprise:" "I woke up in a daydream/A dream was all it was/And I'm still lying in my bed/I'm tired of TV dinners."
Sheer brilliance.
Or "Magic Box," in which the boy with the bangs and Brit-pop pout decries the soul-lessness of the shoegazing "music scene" with the lyrics like "Unimpressed and permanently bored/Gazing through tinted glasses/Reaching out to the masses/With universal themes and astral chords."
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Nothing else in Limited Lifetime Guarantee comes remotely close to surpassing this armchair philosophizing. Copely fancies himself a blue-collar kinda guy who reflects his hometown of Worcester, Mass., but the glossy sound of the songs and emptiness of the lyrics undermine that image.
These "gems" of everyday knowledge are wrapped up in a pre-packaged modern rock/ adult alternative facade that has just enough edge to give it "street cred" for announcers on the "new rock peak alternative zone" to cheerfully claim that it's edgy - when compared to matchbox twenty, maybe.
But compared to actual singer/songwriters it's a wash. This guy could write a song about waiting in line for a latte and make it sound like he was mourning a long-lost love.
Copely and producer David Werner use all kinds of modern rock drapery to dress up the essentially uninteresting songs on this dormant disc. There's the scratchy drum loop on "Surprise," and the Chris Issac-like dreamy guitar and keyboard on "Truth and Oil" and the breezy Anglophile tone of "Magic Box."
Copely occasionally cranks up the "rawk," on "Right to my Head" and "Backslide" and "Truth and Oil," but doesn't do that convincingly either. He's stuck between a rock and a bland place, often sounding as uninterested as he accuses other musicians of being.
Copely probably thought of the title Limited Lifetime Guarantee as ironic. And it is. It sounds like the end of an informercial selling a product that sounds great but in reality has little value.
Just like this CD.
