Soul Asylum - Let Your Dim Light Shine

Aaaaand this is where we get off the Soul Asylum bandwagon. Let Your Dim Light Shine isn't a very good album. Sure, it's weird, dark, and prickly which are normally qualities that I like, but it's just not a good album. The music is bad and Dave Pirner should feel bad.

One of the major problems of this album is that it is almost as lyrically shallow as an album can get without involving the black eyed peas. "String of Pearls" is a boring story about how a freaking necklace gets passed around a little bit. It's uninteresting and mildly insulting to the listening audience. If Soul Asylum thought we wouldn't know where the song was going before the end of the first verse they were kidding themselves. The big single from this album, "Misery," is also lyrically challenged. Lines like "We could build a factory and make misery" and "Frustrated incorporated" (the most repeated phrase in the song. Every time I hear it, I can't help but want to yell, "Frustration and misery are not the same thing!") are both boring and dumb. The one positive thing I can say about this album is that by the end of it, I was kind of zoned out and the last few songs blended together into a relatively inoffensive lump. So yeah, that's the big upside of this album.

If you think I'm being unjustly harsh to this album, I encourage you to listen to it back to back with anything else Soul Asylum has ever done. I'm generally a Soul Asylum fan and apologist, but even I know where to draw the line.