Island
Pop, 2021
You know, people think I am a big Nick Jonas fan, likely because I’m one of the five people out there in the whole wide world that publicly demonstrated that I actually listened to his entire catalog of full length albums to date without getting paid for doing so. That’s not true, actually, as a lot of time I listened to this fellow mostly because I’m hoping to see whether he’d ever come up with a song as good as Jealous (spoiler: no). If one needs any further evidence that I am a terrible fan, look no further than me not even knowing that Spaceman exists until someone pointed it out to me.
Did he even do any promotion for this? Maybe the wife told him that the household was big enough for only one famous person, I mean, “famous” person, and it’s not going to be him.
At any rate, it’s a shame that Spaceman has practically hurtled into the black hole, so to speak, when I am writing this, because it’s one of his most coherent efforts to date. I’m not sure why he’s using his falsetto so much often here, as his high pitch is on the nasal “I’m really trying to squeeze out a turd here, so please be polite!” side. Actually, his singing isn’t that impressive, now that I think of it, and Mr Jonas is a pop act that lives and dies by the quality of his materials.
The songs here are, fortunately, a cohesive lot. They fit together, sound like they all belong in the same album, which is a far cry from Mr Jonas’s past efforts which saw him trying to do all kinds of sounds and genres like he’s flinging things at random and hoping to figure out his sound by seeing what sticks.
However, this only brings me to another problem: the sound. If you ask me what kind of music is present in Spaceman, I’d just shrug and say, “You know… er, like Jonas Brothers, or that bloke from One Direction, or wait, I think I hear some Shawn Mendes too.” Now, don’t tell me this bland milquetoast emerged into the scene first, or that other one did the bland stuff first. My point is that these blokes all seem to dip into a common pool of made-by-committee safe songs, and I have a hard time telling them apart. Of course, all of these songs scream “White boys trying probably way too hard to sound like Michael Jackson!”—while listening to the title track and Don’t Give Up on Us, I find myself thinking, “Why can’t Michael Jackson gave me one more Thriller or Bad before he croaked?”
Then, I pause this one and put on Human Nature instead. Say what you will about that fellow and his chimpanzees and beds full of prepubescent boys, but when that fellow was in his prime, listening to and watching him was an experience to cherish.
In a way, Spaceman lives up to its title. It’s not a bad album by any means, but it is at the same time so devoid of any distinctive trait that it instead takes me down to ephemeral acts that leave behind lasting legacies that had these silly young men trying so hard to emulate. How old is Mr Jonas? Too old, I suspect, to be still flailing around looking for a musical identity of his own.
