It looks as though 2003 is fast becoming the year of the follow-up album. The Strokes plan to have their answer to 2001’s Is This It by the fall, along with The Hives first album since the wildly popular Veni, Vedi, Vicious. The White Stripes just released their latest since 2001’s White Blood Cells, and Linkin Park and Godsmack are releasing their first new material since their big-selling works. Now Pete Yorn finally returns with the follow-up to 2001’s Musicforthemorningafter, called Day I Forgot.
Yorn spent much of the past two years on the road supporting Music, and it shows in his new material. Instead of the soft and melancholy sounds that dominate most of the previous album, Day relies heavily on driving beats and steady melodies to push the album.
“Come Back Home,” the first single off the album, is the perfect example of this. It has the basic rock elements of guitars, bass and drums, but little else to add to the melody. The chorus is hooky and very easy to sing along with. At the same time, there isn’t anything particularly stunning or riveting about it; it’s just there.
Songs like “Pass Me By” and “Burrito” follow this same formula. The drums are fast and steady, the guitars are front and center and the choruses are ready for radio. There is the sense, though, that the whole aim of these songs is to be ready for radio, as if Yorn is trying especially hard on this album to break through even more than he did with his previous album.
He then tempers this radio-friendly sensibility with more experimental songs. “Carlos (Don’t Let It Go to Your Head)” sounds more like it came in 1973 rather than 2003, with its dirty guitar riffs and its slow, sexy drumming. There is also the Beatlesque “When You See the Light,” whose bouncy beat could have easily been taken from any number of songs from Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band. Still, these songs act well as buffers between the flat-out rock numbers that are scattered throughout.
Even though he does stretch a little, for the most part he doesn’t stray from the basic sound and feeling he used in Music. Songs like “So Much Work” and “Man in Uniform” could fit easily into the previous album seamlessly. Both use synths and layered instrumentations to sweeten the otherwise down-tempo songs, so that it is not all doom and gloom; Yorn used this trick extensively in Music.
With Day I Forgot, Yorn doesn’t do anything new, which actually isn’t a bad thing. Fans of his previous work should be more than satisfied with what he produces here. But people new to Yorn will do best to look into Musicforthemorningafter before listening to this album–they might get the wrong impression of how great Yorn can be when he isn’t trying.
