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Swimming With Dolphins - Water Colours

Rating

RIYL

Dying slowly

Release Date

05/17/2011

Label

Tooth And Nail

Tracklist

1. Holiday (ft. Sarah Beintker)
2. Easy
3. Sleep To Dream (ft. Sarah Beintker)
4. Diplomat
5. Water Colours
6. Jacques Cousteau
7. I Was A Lover
8. Captured
9. Happiness (ft. Sunsun)
10. Good Times (ft. Modsun)

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Recent Ratings
Rick Gebhardt

If I were a better writer I could render the look of abject horror that remains plastered on my face well after completing this album. And believe it or not, I did subject myself to it more than once in the interest of fairness, which is to say Water Colours manages to garner a higher score than Ke$ha’s Cannibal; twice the rating, in fact. So that’s our brief little to-do about quantifying terribleness, but with three hundred-odd words to go I’m going to take you a little further down the excruciating path that is Water Colours, so don your Aviators and your ironic throwback basketball jersey, and fill your red Solo cup from the keg, because it’s spring-time, and that means this type of garbage is in season!

Now I’m assuming most of you have allergies to the kind of soulless synth-pop plied by Swimming With Dolphins, but in case you’re feeling adventurous, let this be a cautionary tale; seriously, do not approach this album without an epi-pen. The whole ocean theme is appropriate because listening to Water Colours is like drowning in sight of shore. Now, beyond my weak attempts at humor and metaphor, the bare truth is that unless you have an appetite for vague touches of auto-tune, sunshine-dappled Owl City anorexia, and re-hashed hooks that can’t decide if it’s 1985, 1997, or 2009, you will find this disc abhorrent, which is actually sort of ironic if you think about SWD’s utter lack of personality—the warmth and charm of a mall comes to mind.

Rooting around for a pulse on Water Colours is a fool’s errand. There’s not one iota of passion to be found here, and therefore you’re likely to hear lead single “Sleep to Dream” in heavy rotation if not on top-forty radio, then at least on a stereo (iHome?) while a few Frisbees are being tossed around. This sort of glossed, pre-fab music is never going to find itself with a soft spot in my heart, and no amount of trying to project the “sunny days” is going to give this album any life. Sterile, meaningless, and ultimately disposable, Swimming With Dolphins is the sort of pop music footnote that experiences a brief uptick in popularity and then joins the ranks of Milli Vanilli in the discard pile.

--Jacob Oliver