Capital Cities EP

I feel like I always need to start reviews of this nature with a disclaimer. You see, on the list of basic music genres, pop and dance tunes rank near the bottom in my personal tastes. They trump polka, but that's about it. Well and possibly modern pop country. But again, you've got that nasty pop screwing up decent country music from years gone by. Anyway, I say that I should give a disclaimer because I feel like I'm automatically biased against pop music, but not necessarily by any fault of the artist in question (whoever it might happen to be at the time).

Let's take a band like Capital Cities, shall we? Now these fine gents have released a self-titled EP and as luck would have it, it's a dance pop EP. It's chock full of bouncy tunes, catchy vocals (depending on how you like your vocals) and good production value. It sounds like it's radio-ready and tailor-made for the club. As an added bonus, it's got a bit of an 80s vibe. If that sounds like your idea of a grand time, then by all means, check this out. At only five tracks and 18 minutes, it's on the short side, but that just means you'll get through more rotations when you're driving down the road with your stereo pumpin'.

Here's my problem: I can't stand it. I recognize the talent and effort that went into putting this together. I get that a lot of people love poppy music. But for the most part, those people aren't me. I have almost no patience for pop music and even less for poppy dance music. There's simply too much music that's more interesting and more compelling than stuff like this. This numbs my brain and makes me wish for...well just about anything else. It's vapid and uninteresting.

So the grade I gave this reflects more of an attempt to be fair, taking other people's tastes in music into consideration, rather than just going off of my own. Otherwise that rank would be lower. But hey, pop apparently does someone good, so hopefully they'll come across this and really dig it.