San Diego pop trio almost monday (stylized lowercase), has gained notoriety by opening for acts like The Driver Era and AJR. After about five years of exclusively dropping EPs and singles, the band dropped their debut album in September, DIVE.
Sadly though, the band crafts contrived surfer pop perfect for a Kohl’s commercial, and at a quick twenty-eight minutes, the eleven song album packs zero punch and zero replay-ability.
Let’s take a step by step look into the album.
Starting strong, the album’s doo-wop intro “dive,” sparks unwarranted anticipation for the rest of the work. Album highlight, “is it too late?” follows, which is quite the ear-worm, nothing wrong here. Don’t get too excited yet though, because by the fourth track “you look so good,” the entire mirage of decency has crumbled.
The single “she likes sports” quickly follows, which is the album’s lowest point. I’ve heard this song in at least three cheesy Disney channel action montages. The song describes the singer’s dream girl who “likes sports”… and that’s about it, a very solid concept.
The chorus of the album’s second single, “can’t slow down” painfully rips from Empire of The Sun’s “We Are The People” but at least makes the song catchy. The next track, another single called “jupiter” is perfectly mediocre, but I found myself with absolutely no desire to re-listen to it.
Track “tidal wave” begins with the lyric “Nice to meet ya, she’s a barista” which paired with the song’s bubblegum melody, warranted an eye roll from me. Some of the album’s lyrical sins could survive if they were paired with more interesting music–but they’re not. This leads to them being glaringly obvious, because neurologically or something your ears will do absolutely anything to avoid listening to every song’s bland backing track.
“Seaside market” is nothing particularly special, but it’s my personal favorite on the record because it manages to have some charisma and charm. It’s a simple chord progression and melody, but the brass suite saves it.
The longest song on the album is a measly 3:02 minutes, with all the others averaging in at about 2:30 minutes. This makes it feel rather half baked and premature, but at least they’re not trying to drag the album out to a scary thirty-eight minutes.
I see what they’re going for here, the aesthetic is beach-y, all lowercase, picturesque, and delightful. However, the execution is extremely cheap.
These men have clearly been given about five dollars from Hollywood Records to spend on this album and its promotion, and that’s evident in the fact that a high school newspaper staffer is writing about them. Some of the mixing on the album is sloppy, but generally it comes off as polished and clean.
Overall, I’m not very impressed, so numerically I’ll give it a bland four out of ten. The album’s singles did come with some pretty cool visuals though, so I’d recommend checking those out if you’re interested. A disheartening debut, but there’s always room for growth in the future.