That is So Not OK

Let’s be honest for a moment: Would OK Go still be a thing without their videos? This quartet’s music generates the most playfulness and slack-jawed wonder only when they step in front of cameras and lip-synch among choreographed treadmills and loft-sized Rube Goldberg machines. Able to manage one, maybe two tracks with any social media-driven staying power on each of their first four albums, they incorporate today’s technology like a cyborg on fifth album Hungry Ghosts, assembling songs inside a web of studios full of synthesizers and Reason-loaded workstations.

Yet somehow, this is an album that feels way behind the times. It’s not just that there are New Order basslines hiding in “The Writing’s on the Wall,” or disco strings woven through the center of the LP. By themselves, conceits like those can still entertain. The biggest problem? Most of the arrangements and thematically directionless lyrics on Hungry Ghosts cover sonic ground that Bloc Party and Metronomy and Klaxons already claimed within the last 10 years. Those names represent the best of first and maybe second wave indie-dance; deliberate, fading copies like “I Won’t Let You Down” don’t justify OK Go starting a third.

The slow funk of “I’m Not Through” gets the neo-disco formula close enough to correct, and one of these days you’re sure to hear ESPN slide “The One Moment” behind some sports highlight montage. But we’re not going to waste your time mentioning other song titles because there’s ultimately nothing here to make you—or us—care about this set of music. It’s brave of these guys to veer off the rock map laid out in front of them, but Hungry Ghosts feels stilted and out of place in much the same manner as Trans does for Neil Young. And for a band whose output was never particularly strong to start with, OK Go aren’t merely lost, they’ve now fallen off the edge of the world.