Fitz and the Tantrums are back with a new track off their upcoming record ‘More Than Just a Dream’, and honestly I didn’t expect this tamed sound from this R&B-bluesy band so wild on stage. I understand that bands want to try something else and expect their sound to evolve in different direction but ‘Out of My League’ lacks their kick-ass personality, and kind of sounds like many New-Wave songs I heard in the 80s…. A lot of people are gonna wonder, where is the blues and the Motown inspiration?
I guess they got a little tired to get pigeonholed as the next R&B revival band and wanted to blur things up a bit: it is probably what frontman Michael Fitzpatrick explained when he was interviewed by Rolling Stone
‘We wanted to show people that this band was more than a ‘retro band.’ We’d all gotten a little bit tired of that one moniker that kept getting applied to us. To me, obviously, there was obviously a lot of Motown, retro-soul influence to [the first record], but there was just as much Eighties influence, indie-rock influence, new-wave and hip-hop all mixed in. That first record was that kind of hybrid, and on this record, we just wanted to push it even more forward and take even more chances, and it just required a lot of experimentation…’
The band is definitively a hard working one, according to Rolling Stone, they recorded 40 demos in 30 days but they finally reduced this large batch to 12 songs, with the help of producer Tony Hoffer, who worked with Beck, Phoenix and Depeche Mode, and who guided ‘the band’s blending of the organic and the synthetic’.
I understand the blending of sounds, although I still have to listen to the Tantrums’ hip-hop side, that Fitzpatrick compared to the Beastie Boys’ first record.
And talking about ‘Out of my League’, Fitzpatrick had this to say:
‘On the first record, it was always like the Sixties was in the foreground, and there was a layer of Eighties behind it. But on [Out Of My League], it’s reversed: The Eighties influence has kind of come to the foreground, and the Sixties soul is kind of layered behind that.’
I totally hear this in the song, but, honestly, who wants to pick the 80s over the 60s? At least if you pick the 80s, pick Blondie or the Cure, not Wham or Spandau Ballet.