Andrew Taggart and Alex Pall are The Chainsmokers, a crime against music.
Andrew Taggart and Alex Pall are The Chainsmokers, a crime against music.
You've got to be confident to call your debut album 'Do Not Open'. Or stupid. With The Chainsmokers, it's easy to decide which it is.
Thanks to an infamous interview in which they claimed "hooking up with hotter girls" as their inspiration for making music, the New York electro-pop douches aren't known for their brain smarts.
This, The Chainsmokers' debut, proves their music is similarly brain dead too.
Most of the hooks for the 12 insipid songs on Memories ... Do Not Open combine tinny drum patterns with three-chord progressions to create barrel-bottom scraping pop songs that sound as empty as a tin can rattling around in a car boot.
Then there are those lyrics. Sung by Taggart as if he's camped out in a confessional box for dude-bros, it's like someone leaked Zac Franich's teenage diary in text form then converted them into songs. Terrible, awful songs.
"We were staying in Paris / To get away from your parents," sings Taggart on Paris, one eternal, interminable moan of a song.
"I'm sorry / I can't make it to your party," he croons on The One, almost definitely making that party 100 per cent better.
And the emo stomp of Break Up Every Night includes this clunker: "She's got seven personalities / Every one's a tragedy".
But this crapfest reaches a crescendo on Honest, a ballad in which Taggart appears to threaten to cheat on a girlfriend while he's on tour because, "I'm not sober," "You're not the only one on my mind," and, "It's been three weeks at least, now." Three weeks! So many feels! The poor dude-bro!
Here's some more honesty. I had real trouble opening this CD thanks to the impenetrable plastic cover shrink-wrapped around it. It took dedication, passion, a cracked fingernail and several minutes of intense use of a scalpel to cut my way into it.
That, surely, is more effort than The Chainsmokers show across the entire 43 minutes of Memories ... Do Not Open. Memories? That title should be a warning, because listening to this is like flipping through an empty photo album - a blank and entirely pointless exercise.
