There is no nice way to put this. Approaching Normal is an awful, awful record. Nobody loves sad bastard music more than I do. I love depressing records about breaking up with girls and feeling down and all that emotional bullshit. As much as I love all that stuff, there is a limit. Blue October has pushed me to that limit. Approaching Normal is an hour of bad teenage poetry set to mediocre post-grunge. Lead singer and primary songwriter Justin Furstenfeld needs to buck up.
Justin Furstenfeld is persecuted. He’s persecuted by the world, by his girl, but most of all by himself. The entire record is Furstenfeld feeling sorry about his lot in life. He claims to be approaching normalcy, but he’s still haunted by his demons. The album begins with “Weight of the World,” which begins with hotel security knocking on Furstenfeld’s door. He wakes up and finds the mirror broken, his skin cut up and his lip busted, and that’s just the first minute! Things continue to get worse, punctuated by Furstenfeld’s anguished screams.
Furstenfeld actually has a decent voice, it’s quite emotive. The emotion is undercut by Steve Lillywhite’s production, which is clean, spotless and absolutely perfect. This album would benefit from a raw, messy production because it would highlight the band’s strengths. Because the production is clean, the flaws are there for all to see: The maudlin lyrics, the boring riffs, “quirky” sound effects. It sounds like pretty much every other mainstream rock record of the late 2000s. It’s surprising, considering that Lilywhite was behind the boards for U2’s The Joshua Tree, one of the best sounding records of all time.
I don’t doubt Justin Furstenfeld’s sincerity. I don’t think he’s putting on an act, and his singing does have a cathartic quality. But the gloom never stops, and it becomes overwhelming. If Furstenfeld was a good writer, like Elvis Costello or Bob Dylan, it would be palatable. Unfortunately Approaching Normal is saddled by ridiculous images of kangaroo tears and jump ropes. Furstenfeld couples painfully obvious similes and metaphors (“Life is like a jump rope, it goes up and down”), with hilariously direct lines (“You are stealing food off my family’s plate!”) No cliché goes unturned here. There’s a children’s choir tacked onto the end of “Jump Rope.” That’s certainly never been done before. Even when Furstenfeld is trying to be light, his writing is heavy handed. The main melody of “Blue Skies” is lifted from Bobby Vinton’s 1964 hit “Mr. Lonely.”
The key to writing a good, depressing album is to punctuate it with moments of levity. The Smiths were masters of this technique. The highlight of The Queen is Dead is “There is a Light That Never Goes Out.” The sadness of that song was offset by lighter numbers like “Frankly Mr. Shankly.” Furstenfeld is so utterly humorless that he brings the listener down with him. He’s trying to be an uplifting presence, but there is nothing uplifting about his guttural screams. Even when he’s trying to sound happy, he sounds anguished. After listening to this record several times, I hope he’s found a decent analyst.