NeverShoutNever – What Is Love

What is love?  This is a question that has plagued many from world renowned musicians like Haddaway to thespians like Will Ferrell and the dude from Corky Romano.  Either way, it is the question that Never Shout Never front man Christofer Drew Ingle has decided to take on.  With a little self-reinvention (and possibly some help from producer Butch Walker), he manages to write a much more solid album than he has ever released, as well as completely detaching himself from the electro-pop sound.  Not to mention, the album isn’t focused around one top 40 single, which is almost completely unheard of from a major label artist.
The album opens with “Love Is Our Weapon”, a little song where Drew sings “We’ve got a hard day a-coming if we can’t work out all the pissy little problems that we’re fighting about”.   While the album has a few slightly political topics such as this, there are still many songs about girls.  “Jane Doe”, is a cute little pop song, but where the song succeeds as opposed to past material is that it takes off, and isn’t quite just a blanket of sound.
“Can’t Stand It” and “I Love You 5” are both cute songs but they are not the core reason why this album is stepping in the right direction.  It’s songs like “Sacrilegious”, “What Is Love” and “The Past” that make this album strong.  The songs are very much new ground for NSN.  While “Sacrilegious” sounds like a church hymn written by someone who questions the way some people seem to view religion.
“What Is Love” sounds very much like past NSN material, but it takes off once the full band kicks in, and it shows some of the band’s stylistic versatility.  However, the song that really shows growth in the band is the final song on the album “The Past”.  Drew sings about smoking cigarettes and “the green” as an escape from things, and while it’s definitely not news about his off stage habits, it’s very refreshing to see someone with his pop culture status talk about this stuff so openly.
It’s definitely not Never Shout Never’s best album, however it’s a step in the right direction.  Yeah, he still writes cute pop songs about girls, but Drew’s definitely got more layers than everybody seemed to realize.   It’s only a matter of time until he can start to really experiment musically, and hopefully he can help bring the album back to being more important than the single.