Must Hear Tracks: “Ride” “Tear In My Heart” “We Don’t Believe What’s On TV”
I wanted so very badly to give this album a one out of five. I wanted to laugh ironically at every song. I wanted to listen to Blurryface and shake my head at overly-serious lyrics masquerading as motivation. Going into it, I considered Twenty One Pilots a glorified Christian rock band with an aesthetic that clicked with the teenage masses. “Tattoos and goofy personalities? Tyler Joseph and Josh Dun are defying cultural norms! They’re so woke, so deep.” I recently saw an Instagram video of teenage girls literally trampling each other to get good seats at a Twenty One Pilots show. At the time, I was appalled. Why would anyone risk death to see such self-righteous music?
As much as I wanted to hate Blurryface, I can’t, at least not completely. The Columbus, Ohio duo have surpassed my admittedly very low expectations. They’re a genuine band with nothing but good intentions. I have to admit they have some skill, even though they’re not my cup of tea.
Blurryface is a stylistic odyssey, an exercise in copy/paste. Old-school rave breaks are spliced into “Lane Boy” after a reggae-inspired introduction. “Ride” is another track with a reggae vibe which it pairs with a lovely Vampire Weekend-invoking vocal melody. Along with numerous well-executed reggae and electronic passages (Message Man is another noteworthy example), some tracks incorporate ukulele (The Judge, We Don’t Believe What’s On TV). These tracks add a cutesy folk-pop element to Blurryface. On top of that, Tyler Joseph jumps between rapping and singing with ease throughout the album. With all these varied styles coming and going (often within the same songs) Tyler Joseph and Josh Dun’s composition skills are highlighted. Simply put, it’s difficult to make satisfying genre-bending pop music with so many unexpected transitions.
Lyrically, Tyler Joseph has a few direct hits and many misses. Lines like “Out of student loans and treehouse homes we all would take the latter (ladder)” (Stressed Out) are witty enough to coax a grin out of my cynical ass. On the other hand, the opening line of Tear In My Heart: “Sometimes you gotta bleed to know that you’re alive and have a soul” proves Joseph can work with raw emotional assertions as well as wit. Those sporadic emotionally charged assertions give Twenty One Pilots’ love songs a punch that sets them apart from other trendy bands today. Tear In My Heart, with its powerful opening statement, is one example. The song plays like The Killers and Walk the Moon joined forces and poured their collective talents into one adorable love song. We Don’t Believe What’s On TV is the other noteworthy example. It contains (arguably) the most innocent and beautiful line on the album: “I used to say I wanna die before I’m old, but because of you I might think twice.” As the last lyric of the chorus, listeners get to meditate on that statement for a few seconds before the song picks back up. As a whole, the songs sounds like it’s trying too hard to seem trendy, but that one notable line and the flow of the backing music are enough to make it likable.
While his lyrics occasionally hit with impressive clarity, Joseph does slip into the off-putting seriousness and pseudo-depth that I expected to dominate Blurryface. “My name is Blurryface and I care what you think” (Stressed Out) is a rather anti-climactic and heavy handed way to drop the album title. He does it again in Lane Boy with the blatant “all these songs I’m hearing are so heartless.” Surely there’s a better way to word that, maybe one that doesn’t reinforce the same trend he’s bringing to light. Examples like this crop up all over Blurryface and they detract from the experience. Conveniently enough, Joseph summarizes his own songwriting hiccups himself, also in Lane Boy: “honest, there’s a few songs on this record that feel common.” His stereotypical bellyaching over the low quality of mainstream pop music and his tendency to oversimplify (and therefore, butcher) the most complex themes in his songs forces me to agree with him wholeheartedly.
Everything considered, Blurryface is a pretty compelling album. It’s scatterbrained, with no dominant style or vibe. The arrangements allow many styles to coexist without undermining each other. Lyrically, Tyler Joseph is something of an enigma. Some lines contain raw emotion conveyed with clarity. Others break the fourth wall. Meta-songwriting like this exposes Joseph’s self-awareness as a performer. It also feels unnecessary most of the time. Still other lyrics come off as half-assed attempts to be deep without using the necessary words to get the idea to really stick.
My overall opinion of Twenty One Pilots puts them in context: they are an extremely popular band at the moment. They didn’t amass a small army of fans by being legitimately weird, that’s not how popularity works. Twenty One Pilots is “weird” and “deep” music for people who aren’t actually weird. Through that lens, Twenty One Pilots is not the worst band a teenage girl could be listening to. Tyler Joseph and Josh Dun seem like really good people who want nothing more than to have a positive impact on their fan base. The are definitely accomplishing that goal, even if their music doesn’t quite live up to the reputation their fans have built for them. They’re a great first favorite band, a step in the right direction but not the final destination. “Diverse and inconsistent” is the most succinct description I can offer for Blurryface. It has a few notable peaks and many valleys, both lyrically and musically. It never stays in one place long.
The Healthy Alternative 
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