ARTIST: Mayer Hawthorne
ALBUM: Where Does This Door Go
LABEL: Republic Records
RELEASE DATE: July 16, 2013
Where’s the Soul?
Written by Dan Sinclair
Hawthorne is the name of the street Andrew Cohen grew up in Michigan and Mayer is his middle name. There you go. Now you know that. Where Does This Door Go is Mayer Hawthorne’s fourth studio album and his first since 2011’s critically acclaimed How Do You Do. Mayer produced the album along with a ton of others including Pharrell Williams of The Neptunes, N.E.R.D. and the two most annoying songs in recent history Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” and Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines.”
So why the lowest rating in Dan Sinclair Rukus history? Well, for one, what exactly is it? Mayer Hawthorne’s style has been labeled as “Neo-Soul,” “Retro Soul” or “Alternative R&B,” which is pretty insulting to every word used there (yes, even Neo from The Matrix would be offended here). The more accurate term that can be used to describe Where Does This Door Go is ridiculously over-produced boring mediocrity… that maybe you can dance to if you really, really wanted to dance and there was nothing else on the radio and jamming out to your grandmother’s farts was not an option.
You see, in order to sing soul music, one would have to put one’s soul into said music, but Mayer Hawthorne’s vocal samplings over what seems like the same tired beat again and again is almost utterly soulless as if it were just programmed earlier and is now just being shit out by a robot. If there ever was a soul involved here it was most likely sold to make this record.
Does it have a retro sound to it? Sure, in the sense that it sounds like I’ve heard it before a long time ago. In the first song “Back Seat Lover,” Mayer explains “I would never hit and tell” over a monotonous, generic beat. Perhaps the intention here was to make one remember that the great Stevie Wonder soulful poppy work “Part Time Lover” and then hopefully trick the listener into thinking the songs were somehow related or that one inspired the other. The problem is that Mayer’s song lacks the feeling and power of Stevie Wonder with his vocals being at best unforgettable and at worse, well… the worst. Sure Mayer croons in a falsetto of sorts but there never seems to be any range, nor is there any passion behind the empty words.
“The Innocent” follows this song and if you didn’t speak English, it would be hard to tell that this was a different song than the first sounding more like one of the songs you’d skip on a Hall and Oates CD in the 80s than any soul from the 70s. “Allie Jones” sounds a little less 80s but is still just as boring as its predecessors with Mayer’s voice growing emptier and emptier the longer album goes on. “The Only One” starts off promising with a quicker, more poppy beat but once it gets going, it falls right back into the droning the rest of the album has been thus far.
The single “Her Favorite Song” and the follow-up “Crime” break up the monotony for a little bit, but only because the first song has female vocals in the chorus and the second has Kendrick Lamar busting a few rhymes. So, in other words, the best part of the Mayer Hawthorne album is when someone other than Mayer Hawthorne is performing.
But then the boredom continues with “Reach Out Richard” and “Corsica Rose” and… oh, it doesn’t fucking matter. Pretty much every song on this album sounds the same with the next just as forgettable as the one before it. You see, I’m a martyr. I listened to this album from start to finish several times so you don’t have to.
While an argument can be made that one’s personal preference for different kinds of music can cloud his or her judgment in trying to objectively evaluate, the universal rule that transcends all genres is that good music cannot be boring. You can label Where Does This Door Go in any number of ways that you want, but the one that can’t be ignored is that it’s boring as fuck. If this is “Neo-Soul,” “neo” must mean “without” in some language because this album is soulless and robotic, lacking any kind of real passionate feeling that should reside in important music. Worthwhile music will always leave you with something, something that will stick with you the rest of your life. The only thing one can take from Where Does This Door Go is a nap.