Review: Train, For Me, It’s You

Pretty good and perhaps even a little bit progressive for Train but still woefully underwhelming by any other measure of quality, For Me, It’s You is, in spite of all of the grand orchestral swells that bolster frontman Pat Monahan’s outsized emoting, a louder album than its predecessors, showing just a hint of fray at its sandblasted edges. For a band that’s built a career on aggressively middlebrow Adult Top 40, this means that much of the album, rather than trying to be even more anonymous than Lifehouse or 3 Doors Down, tries to out-U2 Coldplay.

“Get Out” and “Am I Reaching You Now” strive for massive arena-rock grandeur, and, while Train is slick and professional enough a band to pull that off, what prevents the album from working even as marginally as X&Y and certainly not as well as the Constantines’s Tournament of Hearts is the banality of the songs’ lyrics. While Monahan is the band’s principal songwriter, it’s telling that there’s not a writer’s credit to be found anywhere in For Me, It’s You’s liner notes, so devoid are these songs of a distinctive voice.

Lead single “Cab” fares worst, opening with the emetic “New York snow this time of year/There’s nothing more beautiful to me/Except for you,” which provides ample cannon fodder for those already dismissive of the band’s MOR sound and is a good long way from the deliberately ridiculous lines of “Meet Virginia” and “Drops of Jupiter.” No one does or says anything of lasting consequence on the album, and while disliking Train still seems mean, they’re a band that comes off as aware of their own irrelevance and are more resilient because of it. That a Grammy-winning, major label rock outfit can still position themselves as something of an underdog likely goes a long way toward explaining why Train moves more records than, say, the Calling, which is a trend that For Me, It’s You will likely continue.