“Cool Out” by Imagine Dragons, Sunday, July 3, 2022

 

The rise of Imagine Dragons' popularity coincides with my first musical famine--a time when I was so disinterested in music that I stopped keeping up with it. I can't blame the ex-Mormon band for causing that musical famine because there was a lot going on in my life at that time. Like many college graduates entering the workforce, music gets demoted in terms of priorities. There are also shifts in musical tastes about every five years, and the music that was the soundtrack to some of the best years of your life isn't relevant to the next half-generation. It's how you go from a 23-year-old kid in your dorm room discovering progressive-shoegazer EDM with pop leanings to "everything sounds generic, and I think I hate music now."

I LIVE MY LIFE IN BLACK-AND-WHITE. Still, many crotchety music critics agree that there was a musical drought in the '10s, and they cite Imagine Dragons' status as the biggest rock band of that decade as proof. From the band's first single "Radioactive," they heralded a genre-less future of music. In the '20s, we've had many examples of genre-bending to the point that many are calling genre a mood rather than a fixed style of music. I've highlighted many great examples of this from Thirty Second to Mars to Lana Del Rey to Gorrillaz to Anberlin's recent music. And for better or worse, we have to credit Imagine Dragons for the musical risk it took to be promiscuous with genre in the early '00s. However, unlike the artists I've listed above, Imagine Dragons tends to support desultory listening. In 2012 and 2013 when I first listened to "Radioactive" and its parent album Night Visions, it certainly didn't inspire me to go seek out what else I was missing out on in rock and pop rock but rather to listen to only the groups that I liked the most, and ironically, start listening to K-pop as I was acclimatizing to life in Korea.

I DON'T THINK I'M THE ONE FOR YOU. I can't write off Imagine Dragons completely, though. After college I started going through my hard drive deleting old files and albums I just could not get into. I do that from time to time with my AppleMusic collection too. Even though there are probably ten Imagine Dragons songs I can list by name because they are so annoying, think “Thunder,” “Demons,” and “Radioactive,” occasionally the band decides to forsake their bombastic, repetitive song structure and sound like, well, music. Today’s song, “Cool Out” is a love song about lead singer Dan Reynolds meeting his wife. Highlighting a more chill New Wave vibe, this isn’t the most standout track from the band. This song wasn’t a single from the record, and it’s the kind of song that shows why better third or fourth wave new wave bands like White Lies aren’t popular. So is today’s song the best song ever? Nope. It’s passable. And in Imagine Dragons’ discography it’s certainly one of their better tracks.







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