Citizen – As You Please

Citizen has to be one of the most overrated bands that kids that don’t know anything about music love to gush about and wax faux-intellectual over. With their latest release we get more insufferable, drizzling-shit, bubblegum-pop disguised as something deep and meaningful that some pathetic dweebs are sure to hang themselves over.

The songs on this record are extremely poppy from beginning to end, very sugary musically, but they’re just not catchy at all. How can a band be so meticulous about crafting poppy songs, yet make them also be so bland and hook-less at the same time? I suppose that’s a talent in itself – a shitty talent, but a talent no less. While the songs remain poppy, yet bland, Citizen keeps this macabre and dreadful tone in their music and in their lyrics, which you think might invokes some type of original voice or style to what they’re doing, but it doesn’t. They just come off as awkward and unauthentic, like they’re trying way too hard.

As You Please uses only the slickest production. All the drums are fake, they’ve all been completely replaced. I mean, what’s the point of rock ‘n’ roll anymore if you’re not even going to use the original drums? All the guitars aren’t recorded through real amps, obviously – they’re all way too pretty for that – and there are way too many stacked guitar tracks anyway. No band is ever going to sound like this live without fake backing tracks. You want a great sounding studio record, yes, but you can do that without overkill! The bass guitar doesn’t even sound like a bass guitar, it sounds like a broken drive-thru speaker. The vocals are stacked so much that I forgot this was a rock ‘n’ roll record and thought I was listening to a Mariah Carey record for a minute or something. And why the need for all the effects and Auto-Tune on the singer’s vocals anyway? Can the guy not sing or what? Then there are extra production noises for no reason. It’s all just a bunch of fluff and nonsense.

Citizen
As You Please
[Run For Cover]