Jonas Brothers - A Little Bit Longer
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www.slantmagazine.com Rating: 0
aybe my tolerance for teen pop, both the legitimately well-crafted and camp varieties, has finally hit a peak, but I just don't have much use for the current cycle of youth-oriented, mostly Disney-spawned acts like Miley Cyrus, Aly & AJ or the Jonas Brothers. For their first serious album, A Little Bit Longer, the trio of Kevin, Joe and Nick Jonas have at least stopped writing songs about taking rockets to the year 3000 and co-opting the premises of second-tier ABBA cuts, but supposed maturity doesn't necessarily suit them all that well either. Say what you want about MMMBop, but Hanson's second and third albums demonstrated a real facility with classic pop conventions and the ability to write massive and memorable hooks. The Jonas Brothers, ostensibly the Hanson to Miley Cyrus's Britney Spears in this pop cycle, show no such skill on Longer.
That the best thing that can be said about any of their songs is that they're all short enough not to overstay their welcome puts them ahead of whoever it was that writes Hilary Duff's material, but it doesn't exactly inspire much confidence about the brothers' long-term prospects once the pop bubble inevitably bursts. Songs like opener BB Good (which stands out only for a couple of unintentionally hilarious spoken-word asides) and Shelf are emo-lite pop-rock numbers for kids not quite ready for the heady complexity of Jimmy Eat World or without the grasp of irony necessary to appreciate Fountains of Wayne. If vapid and lacking strong hooks, that style of song, which comprises the bulk of the album, is at least functional within the context of the band's wholesome persona. On the other hand, something like lead single Burning Up makes literally no sense as all, attempting to position the Jonas Brothers as Maroon 5 for the True Love Waits set.
Given that profound lack of self-awareness, it's tempting to make more lurid readings into some of the other cuts (i.e., Lovebug is obviously about VD, while One Man Show answers the threat of Pink's U & Ur Hand with a That'll be fine shrug), but there's barely enough content to the songs to justify them as disposable Top 40 fodder let alone to justify any potential snark. More than anything else, Longer is inert. The music itself shows...
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