Jack Johnson really adores the sun, and who can blame the guy?
Without it – let’s face the chilly truth – he would have no sandy beaches, no Hawaiian muses, no career.
So I guess it must have felt right to flaunt his 100 percent dedication to solar ener gy four different times in the packaging of his latest LP, Sleep Through the Static. Gotta give back to your god somehow.
A nice gesture, I guess, but the whole thing will mislead the hell out of you if you’re looking at it sonically. There just isn’t a whole lot of shiny, happy feeling on this album. But it has no shortage of unnecessary sleep.
Sadly, Jack didn’t stick with what he does best – singing goofy, laid-back, easy songs for college students to devour in a post-coital state. Nothing more, nothing less.
This time we get “mature” Johnson. What this means is an acoustic guitar with that same over-and-over strum from his radio hits, but with a tone that’s a little lower. And he gets the memo on Iraq.
I think I speak for all the girls crazy for “Banana Pancakes” and (mainly) their sort-of-into-it boyfriends when I wonder, why did you start reading the paper, Jack? Where’s your mojo?
Jack does his best Johnny Cash impression in the opener “All at Once,” setting the darker tone of the album by lamenting that “a heart is no place to be singing from at all.” Okay, so the surfer wants to catch the tidal wave – he wants to talk politics.
It’s a decent song that nicely segues into the title track, which sounds a little like “The Horizon Has Been Defeated,” his massive hit from 2003. Notice I’m not criticizing him for the redundancy. I like that he stuck with his guns here at least.
There’s even an evocative lyric – “who needs please when we have guns.” Jack avoids the obvious “peace,” and doesn’t fall on his face as he decries the American war effort. Well done.
And then there’s nothing for thirty minutes. Jack has inherited John Mayer Syndrome with boring song titles like “Hope” and “Adrift,” and certainly doesn’t help his cause with a lot of faux-ambitious songs sprinkled with simple life lessons.
He urges you to “better hope you’re not alone” again and again. He wonders “how come when we say we do, we don’t.”
The new father promised deeper themes and better lyrics, but this stuff failed to keep me hooked on the phonics that is Jack Johnson.
It should be stated that “Monsoon” and “Living Keys,” the final two songs on Sleep, are pretty solid. They just come late for a guy whose guiding star stopped burning far too early.

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