One thing about Lonely Island is they need to do a better job of promoting themselves, I'm actually not being facetious. I was recently talking about new albums I was looking forward to, and one I mentioned was the new Lonely Island "Turtleneck and Chain" that's when a friend of mine said, "that's already out" so with that in mind, here is my late review of the album.
Lonely Island's first album "Incridibad" was incredible, from start to finish, up to that point I had never been a big fan of the whole "joke" song thing, I never really "got" it or enjoyed it. But "Incrdibad" was something completely different. The thing about them is if you didn't know better you would think you were listening to a Top 40 hip-hop song of the day, their music is actually really good. But the content of the lyrics is very funny and mostly very unassuming, in the case of "I'm on a Boat" it sounds like a hit rap track T-Pain hook and all, I've met people that never knew the song was meant to be a joke or farce, and to me thats the key difference with Lonely Island and other "joke" groups, it's legit music that more times than not pokes fun at what it's imitating, while itself is really good music.
So the new album "Turtleneck & Chain" has been out for a couple of weeks and it is Great! I was nervous if they could duplicate what worked so well on "Incrdibad" and they did. One thing about Lonely Island is you get to see their progress each week on SNL a lot of digital shorts end up on the albums, so you already know their will be some quality tracks, like "Jack Sparrow" which is a lot of peoples favorite song off the album, it sounds like a typical "In the Club" song but Michael Bolton is doing the chorus and sings about Jack Sparrow after having just seen the Pirates movies for the first time.
I really like the entire album, some highlights for me are "No Homo" which pokes a lot of fun at how liberally that expression can be used, "Rocky" is a fun song, and "We're Back" is a hilarious way to open the album with a great beat from Kanye's mentor NO Id.
Of course there are songs from the digitals shorts too, "Mother Lover" "Shy Ronnie", "Throw it to the Ground" among others, but for the second time no "Iran" which is still one of my favorite Digital Shorts, a song about Iran leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Andy Samnurg's gay romance, featuring Maroon 5's Adam Levine.
If I have one problem with "Turtleneck & Chain" it's that even with 19 tracks, it's only 38 minutes. That's a small complaint however, better to be short and sweet than to overstay your welcome.
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