One Republic: Dreaming Out Loud : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Timbaland sure has funny taste in rock dudes. From the sound of his latest discovery, OneRepublic, he's been watching a lot of The Hills lately. The Colorado band, longtime music-biz chancers, sounds like an aggressively ordinary Audrina/arena rock combo, combining the least distinctive traits of the Fray, Matchbox Twenty, Nickelback or (to be charitable) Coldplay. But Timbaland has given them a huge hit with his remix of "Apologize," and a fine hit it is, too: a compellingly incongruous teen-romance melodrama, cutting Ryan Tedder's bland vocals with a stuttering R&B drum loop. On the rest of the album, OneRepublic get to assert their own identity, which is a drag, since the half-loud guitars and sob-in-the-throat vocals could be absolutely anybody. Tedder emotes about girls in quizzical plaints like "Mercy" and "Tyrant" ("Capable of most anything/This crippled bird's gonna sing"). From the CD booklet, it seems like the band members are devoutly religious, so maybe they should sing about God instead of girls, which would definitely be more interesting.