Dawes
All Your Favorite Bands
Reviewed by: Max Miller
The funny thing about Dawes titling their fourth album All Your Favorite Bands is that it seemingly confirms their audience is made up almost wholly of 60-year-olds and the 60-at-heart. If “all your favorite bands” are the ones the L.A.-based four-piece are proud to emulate — the Eagles, Jackson Browne and other stalwarts of ‘70s California country-rock — there’s just about nothing here from beyond the turn of the ‘80s. The songwriting’s all sepia-tinted nostalgia and nuggets of pseudo-profound simplicity you’d expect from David Wooderson, like the hook from opener “Things Happen,”: “Things happen; that’s all they ever do.”
But there’s really nothing wrong with older music fans looking for new groups that remind them of their youth. The bone I have to pick is with the young men (and it’s inevitably men) who are Dawes’ age or younger that perpetuate this kind of nostalgia. They’re the type who can’t take anything seriously if it doesn’t have a slide-guitar solo, and they’re the type who go for pensive drives on the highway, reflecting on how old they feel at, like, 22. It’s sick, really. They get trapped in some fatalistic, semi-cinematic concept of young manhood that prevents them from appreciating the actual times in which they’re spending their lives. And I know this for a fact, because I’ve lapsed into it myself from time to time. Hell, I’m a huge Warren Zevon fan. All Your Favorite Bands was so anodyne and predictable that it felt like I heard the album without even listening, but if you put the record on at the right time of the evening and I had a few beers in me, I might lean in to ask, “Hey, who is this?”
So I guess I can’t condemn this album or its listeners without assuming the role of the proverbial pot, shit-talking on kettles. Instead, I’ll leave you with the chorus of the title cut: “I hope that life without a chaperone is what you thought it’d be/ I hope your brother’s El Camino runs forever/ I hope the world sees the same person that you always were to me/ And may all your favorite bands stay together.” If you’re rolling your eyes, you can kindly skip this one. But if you feel a twinge somewhere deep inside, maybe even in spite of yourself, you may need to accept that you’re just the kind of person Dawes are writing for.
Rating: Listenable
