There’s a place on Top 40 radio for dumb songs. Pitbull and Rihanna pretty much live there. There’s a place for trashy songs — here’s looking at you, Ke$ha — and there’s a place for plain old guilty pleasures.

But OneRepublic frontman Ryan Tedder is a boring songwriter with a boring voice backed by boring instrumentals, and there sure as hell isn’t room on the pop charts for monotony. The band’s newest album in its lineage of snoozers, “Native,” might be the biggest yawner of the bunch.

The same flat formula that scored OneRepublic a shot at relevance on its debut album rears its sleepy head again on “Native.” Crank out one smash hit, coast, repeat. But whereas “Dreaming Out Loud” featured blockbuster sad-sack ballad “Apologize,” all “Native” boasts is handclap-laden “Feel Again.”

It’s every OneRepublic single you’ve heard before: Tedder singing mid-tempo falsetto hooks over sloppily synthesized instrumentals. “Apologize” is the kind of song that anchors an album, making up for sloppier tracks. “Feel Again,” after getting used as a teaser lead single, got scrapped as the official single when the band started promoting the record. If Tedder didn’t have faith in it, why should us music fans?

The real showstopper on “Native” is “If I Lose Myself,” a tune that injects some desperate “danceability” to an album that doctors could probably prescribe for sleep aid. It dazzles with some spectacular moments, especially in the song’s dance-floor-worthy last minute.

That’s when “Native” curls back up into hibernation. “What You Wanted” is a sluggish U2 clone, heavy on big, dumb synths and Bono impressions. It awkwardly jumbles into a folksy-acoustic riff that opens “I Lived,” which sounds desperate to cash in on the folk-music-is-hip trend before Tedder launches into a soaring chorus that would work on just about any other song besides this one.

The folksy verses and bubblegum pop chorus clash painfully and sound like OneRepublic smashed two floundering song ideas together while crossing its fingers. That powerful chorus would’ve salvaged “Au Revoir,” a bore of a ballad that spins its wheels for about five minutes. Even “Don’t Look Down,” a cinematic outro flaunting some swirling synthesizers, closes the album on a boring note.

OneRepublic is totally capable of shaking up its sound, and the few tracks that show a departure from the band’s bland formula shine.

Super-producer Jeff Bhasker does some nifty work on “Can’t Stop,” giving a heavily atmospheric, hip-hop-influenced beat for Tedder to sing over. It’s sleek and polished, but not in the overproduced, under-energetic OneRepublic way. It’s baffling why the band didn’t hear the song and immediately ship it to hit the airwaves as a single.

The same goes for “Preacher,” which drags OneRepublic down a completely different direction. Tedder shows off an underutilized soulful side, flexing his pipes for some huge vocal runs. House-music-infused “Burning Bridges” scraps the usual OneRepublic formula, even if parts of the vocal melody sound remarkably like it got lifted from its hit-turned-Disney-ad, “Good Life.”

It’s funny that the band promised it wasn’t rushing “Native” and that the album “has to literally be the best thing we’ve ever done.” They didn’t, but it isn’t. It’s been four years since a OneRepublic album hit shelves, but it still feels like the same old OneRepublic on a different day. There’s not much growth, and the risks feel carefully calculated.

The band called its 2009 sophomore full-length album “Waking Up,” but four years and a handful of boring, mid-tempo songs later, “Natives” is Tedder and company falling right back to sleep.

Published on March 25, 2013 at 10:45 pm

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