JOIN USOneRepublic , the rock band from Colorado, in their third album, Native, experiment with a couple of new sounds, but they continue to stick to their signature hooks and melodies.
In his prolific career, frontman and songwriter Ryan Tedder has worked with big names like Rihanna, Beyonce, Kelly Clarkson, Carrie Underwood, Jennifer Lopez, Adele and Leona Lewis. However, he is unable to transfer his collaborative success to his own band.
The album begins with a stomping track, Counting stars, a song of dreaming and hoping big. If I lose myself is a club banger accompanied by a big chorus. Feel again has ambitions to be an uplifting and celebratory song, but the efforts do not translate to effect. The song was originally written as a single for a charity and has embedded in the song are actual heartbeats from children in Malawi and Guatemala. What you wanted has good production techniques, making for smooth listening. I lived, as the title indicates, is a song about living it up (I owned every second this world could give/I saw so many places/And things that I did/Yeah, with every broken bone/I swear I lived.). However, the additional instrumentation and percussion lets it down.
Light it up is heavy industrial rock with an interesting instrumental outro, but the track on the whole could have been better with a little more sound editing. The intro to Can’t stop is just about average. Au revoir is a hauntingly delicate song in which you can drown. Both Burning bridges and Something I need are killer tracks. Preacher is a song about Tedder’s grandfather with a classical string section and gospel choir. In Don’t look down, the outro is beautiful and moving, but too short a track for its grand intention. The album is not worth a buy. Borrow it and listen, if you must.