AJR - The Click

Mega, MEGA thank you all for 100 followers, I'm surprised that I reached it this quickly, going from around 20 followers in March to 100 in a short five months. Starting up this account again in quarantine was just supposed to be a little distraction from the YouTube channel, but now I have more fun writing on here than for YouTube. To celebrate, there will be lots of important lore reviews coming soon. Love Yourself 轉 'Tear' re-review, 1000 gecs review, Pulse Demon review, Brockhampton and One Direction Worst to Best, lots of good shit coming soon. But for now, we gotta defeat the Three-Headed Hydra of pop music. Or else something bad will happen, I assume.

Now, onto the review!

We're going to start today's review with a bit of a twisty twist, and that is because we have some positives to discuss with this AJR album. I know, I'm as surprised as you are. But I cannot deny that there are a few select tracks that raise the score a whole nine points, those being The Good Part, Weak, and Sober Up, featuring Rivers Cuomo of Weezer fame. These songs are some of the best material that AJR's ever put out, joining Turning Out, Pt. 2 as the four AJR songs that don't make me want to Vincent Van Gough myself. I totally fuck with the instrumental to The Good Part, especially the string sections. It's the only somewhat downbeat instrumental on the entire album. Weak has some interesting lyrical themes and an actual good falsetto on the pre-chorus, as well as having a good instrumental. And Sober Up is probably the least offensive AJR song ever, containing their quietest chorus to date and a bonus eleven seconds of Rivers Cuomo. Good job AJR.

But with that out of the way, it's time to tear AJR a new asshole.

The Click is AJR's sophomore album, released after songs such as Weak and I'm Not Famous started to get them major buzz from retards around the world. And it's fucking terrible.

The Click is one of those rare cases where it's numerous problems crash into each other in such a horrific way, making their effects even stronger than if they were separate, and making me want to commit numerous atrocities and war crimes. The record's biggest problem has to be how obnoxious the lead singer Jack Met is. Let's start with his lyricism. Jack spends the majority of The Click complaining about his first world problems, making him sound like a totally spoiled and entitled man child. Fantano put it best when he described the music as "something Eminem would've made if nothing bad happened to him EVER", because it really sounds like nothing bad has ever happened to these guys, ever.

Examples of this up-the-assery can be found on every single song on the album. The one that triggered me the most is when Jack complains that "rappers have it way too easy" on the song Three-Thirty. Yeah, it's not like they had to commit various crimes, such as selling drugs, stealing, or murdering others, to earn enough money make it through the week, and when they eventually did break through into mainstream society after years and years of cooking up music, they were looked down on by the old, white elites of the world, all because of the color of their skin. They get to rap fast, it's not fair. Other examples of entitlement from Jack include not "having any haters" on the song I'm Not Famous and being caught in social media "drama" on the song Drama.

The types of subjects Jack decides to discuss not only come off of spoiled and entitled, but super childish as well. I know childish is a synonym for both of those words, but what I mean by childish is that these songs sound like they're told by literal fucking children. Call My Dad is probably the best example of this, telling the story of Ryan Met at this lame party in his sophomore year, where he felt so uncomfortable that he felt like he should call his dad to pick him up. No matter how introverted you are, you know calling your dad to pick you up from a college party will get you ridiculed for the rest of your high school life. Not to mention that Ryan mentions that he "bets he looks so grown up with his shirt tucked in his jeans" and that he forgot his retainer. Double yikes. Other examples of AJR's childishness include "I grew up on Disney, but this don't feel like Disney" on the song Turning Out or not knowing how a disco ball works on the song Bud Like You.

This causes what I've classified as the "Lil Dicky Effect" to trigger, in which a performer's nuances are so fucking annoying that it makes their voice sound even more annoying than it would be otherwise. Every time Jack opens his stupid mouth it's very tempting for me to turn this off and question why I even do this to myself. It also doesn't help that Jack's singing is absolute garbage anyway. It's most obvious whenever he breaks into his falsetto, because it's one. It appears all over the record as well, every single fucking track as Jack breaking into his falsetto. That's the thing about this god-forsaken album, every single problem appears on nearly every single track. There are almost NO breaks.

But the lead performer is only half of the music. What about the production? Well, lemme tell ya. The production is just as bad as Jack, if not even worse. The range of instrumentation that the brothers use on The Click is actually pretty wide. Various different types of pianos, guitars, trumpets, drums, violins, and vocal samples are used, with the sounds of the album ranging from electropop, folk pop, regular pop, hip-hop, nursery rhymes, even a little bit of T R A P I N F L U E N C E manages to sneak into a few tracks. But AJR uses these instruments to create some of the most uppity fucking music I've ever heard. It's so annoyingly happy-go-lucky and joyful, it feels like I'm just shoving my mouth full with Skittles and Sour Patch Kids, and washing it down with a large glass of Orange Fanta. It just don't feel good.

On top of that, every track has a ball-bustingly loud chorus to make the uppity sound of the album even worse. They're complex in definition and definition only, they aren't delicately assembled and planned out. They're just a bunch of fucking noise piled on top of more fucking noise. They even show up on the tracks I enjoy, nearly ruining them. And then add on the terrible falsetto, and the fact that the final chorus is even larger and louder than the normal one, and you have a recipe that will go wrong every single time. It's like Imagine Dragons and The Chainsmokers did a fusion dance. Yeah, that's the level of fuck we're on.

And there we have it. The Click, one of the worst albums of all time. You take the self-deprecation of Lil Dicky. The pretentiousness of twenty one pilots' Blurryface. The over-blown sound and horrible combination of genres of Imagine Dragons and The Chainsmokers. And the horrible autotuned vocals of will.i.am. Combine them all, making sure to throw in numerous lit cigarettes and plenty of alcohol, and you get AJR. The second worst artist of all time, just barely better than Dicky.

Even if you take away all of my personal minutiae with AJR, specifically the nature of the band's sound and lyrics, you're still left with an absolute clusterfuck of annoying to deal with, with bad songwriting, bad singing, and bad production. And then factor in that personal minutiae, you have an absolute nightmare of an album, one that tells the story of a spoiled white child who dares to undermine the struggle of other actual people and rants on and on about his first world problems that don't matter. It's obnoxious incarnate. Did you know this was a fucking concept album? Yeah, me neither.

Still better that Neotheater though. I'll get to that when I'm feeling especially suicidal.

Good night everyone. Sleep well. Don't let the AJRs bite.

Favorite Track(s): n/a
Least Favorite Track: Too Many to Fucking Count...