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OHN: Revolutionary Revolution Label: Ill Dough Released: 2007

OHN is a “nu-jazz” group. Which is just a fancy, pompous and misspelled way of saying they combine many of the conventions of jazz music with electronic instruments and improvisation. It’s also a fancy way of telling you that you probably shouldn’t buy their latest record, the ironically-titled Revolutionary Revolution.

Can you call a record a revolution if it consists of 10 songs that sound nearly identical to each other? How is a record a revolution if it one of those 10 tracks is a cover of the Beatles’ “Dear Prudence”? And is it a revolutionary act to have a singer with a flat and annoying voice belt out bland and poorly-written lyrics, or just a really bad idea?

“Attention,” the first track on the album, is the only one that stands out in any way as something that might be worth listening to. It has some great Underworld-style loops and the vocals don’t distract from the killer instrumentation (which includes an awesome guitar solo) that accompany them. It’s all downhill from there, though, as the rest of the album sounds like something Garbage might release if they replaced all their talent with a killer collection of jazz LPs, or if the chick from Portishead did twenty lines of speed and met up with some beatniks.

Electronic music isn’t about the lyrics and it never has been, but it’s nice when the artists try to pretend that it is. “Any Way U Look At It” is a clumsy mess of a song with lyrics that are so awkwardly-written that it sounds like lead singer Allison Scharf nearly stumbles over the line “Any way you look at it you won’t lose / any way I look at it you could lose.” When the lyrics aren’t awful they are just forgettable. You won’t be getting any songs from this album stuck in your head.

Occasionally OHN ditches the vocals (good call) for some instrumental tracks. “Space Cadet” lives up to its name as a slightly spaced-out sounding jam that starts out good but quickly becomes a bore. “Black Seven” is another instrumental and this one is a bomb from the get-go and gets even worse as it slowly descends into full-on jazz improvisation.

Some common criticisms of electronic music are that it is repetitive, generic, and kind of boring. Fans of electronic music (who can be fairly pretentious) claim that you have to be a true fan of the genre to really “get it.” Common criticisms of jazz include that it’s repetitive, generic and kind of boring. Fans of jazz (who can be fairly pretentious) claim that you have be a true fan of the genre to really “get it.”

If you’re in one of those two groups, then you might find something to enjoy on Revolutionary Revolution, but even then it’s doubtful, as their combination of electronic music and jazz is so mismanaged and ill-advised that it’ll probably end up alienating both audiences. There’s no doubt that the musicians behind OHN are very talented, but they’re barking up the wrong tree here. They really should pick a style and stick with it instead of trying to go both ways.