The Weepies

Be My Thrill 2010  

★ ★

If you’re a hardcore The Weepies fan and with their new album were looking for something bland and monotonous, that essentially reiterates their last two studio albums, then you’ve received exactly that with their new release, Be My Thrill. Not to say that there aren’t a few gems amongst the excruciatingly boring indie folk pop explosion that is this album. The opening track, “Please Speak Well Of Me” has gorgeously melancholy lyrics overlaid on top of rather up beat music in true The Weepies fashion and makes your heart hurt just the appropriate amount. The track “Be My Thrill” is quick and cute and though it lacks certain lyrical maturity and substance it does the job of making the listener smile and perhaps spare a thought for that special somebody. These two songs, however passable and catchy, do not, in any way make up for the rest of the album. As a long time fan of The Weepies and beautifully heartbreaking songs such as the simple and yet sublime “The World Spins Madly On” and the wonderfully honest “Gotta Have You” as I sat listening through Be My Thrill my disappointment grew dark and ugly. I won’t sit here saying that this album isn’t catchy, it is. Writing catchy folk pop is something that The Weepies mastered with there 2006 sophomore album, Say I Am You. The lyrical maturity and beauty that flooded both Say I Am You and Hideaway, however, are devastatingly lost in Be My Thrill. It sounds, quite simply, as though Deb Talan and Steve Tannen took the music from their last two albums and paired it with new, less meaningful, less beautiful lyrics. Most every song stares you in the face seeming all too familiar. The less talented little brother of it’s predecessor.