The Chainsmokers' Memories': Is this the worst album of 2017?
Male angst is arguably modern music’s most reliable source of inspiration. From Mozart and Miles Davis to Led Zeppelin and Nirvana, many great works of art have sprung from the minds of angry, horny, depressed and/or lovelorn men. Memories...Do Not Open, the moody debut album from the Chainsmokers, is not one of them.
The story behind the Chainsmokers’ inexplicable rise reads like a screenplay for a Coachella-themed remake of This is Spinal Tap: after forming their EDM group in their Syracuse University dorm room, production duo Andrew Taggart and Alex Pall landed an unexpected hit with their 2014 track #SELFIE, the hashtag included in the title. They spent the next several years cultivating personas akin to the most obnoxious guys in your junior-year apartment complex, advertising their hard-partying ways in embarrassingly thirsty interviews and comparing the sizes of their junk on their band’s official website. Even the group’s decency-challenging name has a bratty backstory, with Taggart and Pall explaining in interviews that they don’t smoke, and only chose the name because its internet domains were available.
All the while, the duo steadily released EPs and one-off singles, until one track became the biggest song in America: 2016’s Closer, which topped the Billboard Hot 100 for 12 straight weeks. Now, the Chainsmokers are near-household names already enjoying the spoils of their success, their next few months booked solid with a lucrative Las Vegas residency, guest-starring stint on Saturday Night Live and summer arena tour, all of which the duo achieved without a proper album. Perhaps they should’ve continued limiting their releases to singles, as Memories, their official 12-song debut, is better left forgotten.
One of the Chainsmokers’ trademark quirks is Andrew Taggart's hilariously bad vocals, which almost sound intentionally weak, like he’s trolling critics who actually expect him to sound like a professional. Taggart couldn’t sing on the Halsey-bolstered Closer, and he still can’t sing now. While the group mercifully invites guest vocalists to assist with most of Memories’ tracks — like Emily Warren, whose twisty-voweled performances on Don’t Say and My Type belong in a mid-2010s time capsule alongside Lorde and Halsey — Taggart is still heard on six of the album’s songs, and that’s six too many.
The Chainsmokers came of age in the 2000s, and hints of the decade’s musical influences peek through in interesting ways on Memories, from their Coldplay-featuring hit Something Just Like This to Break Up Every Night, a distant cousin of one-hit-wonder Metro Station’s Shake It. But for most of the album, Taggart and Pall stay in their house-music lane. Thankfully for the group, enough groundwork has been laid by their EDM peers that their passable production talents still sound on-trend. But Memories’ potential hits lack the thrilling parade of guest stars that have made Calvin Harris’ Slide and Heatstroke so enjoyable, or a unifying aesthetic like Kygo’s signaturetrop-house.
If there’s any sound Taggart and Pall should’ve ripped off, it’s the summertime-ready, vaguely-disco production heard on Harris’ highly listenable new singles and Zedd’s Stay with Alessia Cara. Instead, the Chainsmokers opted to make the least funky album imaginable, a moody collection of tracks that stick to the same white-bread sonic cues, touches of piano and/or acoustic guitar strums, segueing into an Avicii-lite drop. For an album called Memories, it’s faceless and forgettable; while their peers make music for late-night dancefloors, the Chainsmokers made an album of background music for the Uber ride home.
It’s a trope at this point to compare everything in 2017 culture to Trump, but according to that mental exercise, the Chainsmokers’ appeal isn’t all that different from the president. The band’s story is built on their every-dude image, born of the idea that anyone with a dream can become superstars through years of hard work, talent notwithstanding. The group’s fans can tout their populist rise (if you consider a music group born in a private-university dorm room “populist”), while writing off critics of their questionably-sexist lyrics and sophomoric jokes as too-PC. And for listeners tired of progressive politics showing up in their pop culture offerings, who wish Beyoncé would just stick to singing instead of making pro-Black Lives Matter statements, the Chainsmokers’ music offers an alternative.
And to their detractors, the Chainsmokers’ success is yet another example of mediocre white men ascending to outsized levels of power and fame, the celebrities that 2017 deserves.
(Warning: explicit language)