Review Summary: This project had such lofty goals, and fails spectacularly in accomplishing them.
Pretend you’re in a hot nightclub. The lights are low, the music is blasting and all around you, people are having a great time dancing, drinking and flirting. You see your best friend walk up to you, leading a beautiful girl by the arm. He says “Meet Natasha! I was telling her a bit about you, and she’d like to get to know you better!” That’s when you look up from your Blackberry, hold up one finger and say “Just a moment, I need to finish reading this forward from my annoying coworker.” Congratulations. You’ve just listened to Lazyboy TV.
Lazyboy, the post-Aqua musical project of Søren Nystrøm Rasted, was doomed before it even got off the ground. Intended to spearhead a new musical genre, dubbed “Rhythm'n'Speak”, the plan was to sample trivia, newscasts, people on the street and other voices in a spoken word format to act as a criticism of society. You can gauge its success by how many other Rhythm'n'Speak artists you can name. Go ahead, search Google, I’ll wait.
The end result is neither hip-hop nor much of a criticism of anything. Almost as soon as you turn the CD on, opening track “Are You Qualified?” posits several questions to you, the first two of which are “Do you consider yourself intelligent?” and “Are you ready to go all the way?” They devolve into a stream of unrelated questions that fade into each other, giving you no time to answer whatever personal questions Lazyboy is apparently hoping you’re asking yourself. Then comes the chorus that you’ve heard in every dance song that came out between 1992 and 2000, praising individuality, before the voices are back and giving you a list of things not to do. Does it sound like a jumbled mess? Just wait. It’s about to get a whole lot more odious.
The next track, “Facts Of Life”, opens with sampled guitar chords that serve only to create a stuttering mess of an introduction to this track, which presents itself as the facts of life. The chorus comes up almost immediately, stating “This is who we are, this is what we do...” before a bland female voice reads off the sort of trivia you can expect to find in E-mail forwards. How many times have you heard that you’ll swallow eight spiders in a year? Now how many times has a strict automaton recited this ‘fact’ to you over an uneven guitar track? Does that sound appealing at all? Before the song is even over, you may find yourself idly wondering who this song was meant for. Is it meant to show us that we’re all the same despite our differences? Is it meant to reveal hidden truths about what our friends and coworkers are really doing behind closed doors? Is it meant for aliens looking to disprove the idea of intelligent life on this planet?
I’d like to say this song ends, but I can’t tell. Nearly every song on this album is the same format. There’s a vapid chorus that introduces the theme of each song, which is usually expanded on in the form of bland sayings that don’t seem to accomplish much at all. “Inhale Positivity” is about thinking positively, with a bored male voice giving you such advice as spending time with successful people to attract success yourself. “This Is The Truth” gives you many of the same sayings that you’ve seen on inspirational posters in office buildings everywhere. “Man Woman (Yin & Yang)” is a ‘humorous’ back-and-forth dialogue between the same monotone male and female voices trading gender-themed barbs. If you find yourself wondering how dialogue such as “Women have their faults, men have only two/ Everything they say, and everything they do” is meant to be a criticism of society, you’re not alone. This project had such lofty goals, and fails spectacularly in accomplishing them.
With all this in mind, you may wonder what has given the album that extra half star to elevate it above the truly execrable single star rating. The answer lies in the sole bright spot on this album, “Underwear Goes Inside The Pants”. This track, featuring samples of comedian and perennial Comedy Central Roast member Greg Giraldo, carries the distinction of being both entertaining and frustrating. It’s entertaining due to the (Admittedly subjective) humorous observations of Giraldo’s, and the backing music which dials down the feeling of being inside a gay dance club and sounds like something vaguely resembling indie rock. Therein lies the frustration of this track, however. Why couldn’t they all be like this? This track shows that Rasted is able to craft something interesting and thought-provoking, so why did he stand at a crossroads and ultimately decide that the rest of this album needed to be filled out with more vapid assurances of self-worth?
In the end, avoid this album like the plague, but download “Underwear Goes Inside The Pants”. It’ll give you a chuckle (If you're a fan of Greg Giraldo), and when you’re done with it, you can place it innocuously in the middle of mix CDs for your friends and retain your reputation for finding gems out of nowhere for another week.
