Happiness is certainly a virtuous sentiment, but in music there is a fine line between tasteful measured positivity (The Jackson 5) and childish, in-your-face giddiness (The Wiggles). Guster’s new album, Easy Wonderful, certainly straddles that line (c’mon, just look at the name). While the Boston-based band’s jolly demeanor can be uplifting and at times endearing, this attitude doesn’t save the new record from the blatant conventionality of Guster's sound. Risks are few and far between, and are executed so awkwardly that it’s a relief when the band sticks to sing-along harmonies and acoustic guitars.

Guster

Easy Wonderful
Universal Republic

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Album opener “Architects & Engineers” brings out the few strengths Guster keeps in its arsenal: angelic harmonies, an upbeat, sickeningly catchy melody and a power hook that makes this song the best on the entire record. On the chorus, which consists of only “Ooh oohs,” lead singer Adam Gardner’s falsetto shines, and his lyrics capture an innocent, childish nostalgia that few bands can pull off without sounding cheesy. Since Guster lacks even a remote shred of a dark side, it can produce this level of perk sincerely.

Lead single “Do You Love Me” is another grin of a song, with a rollicking melody and Santa Claus bells chiming in to bookend each chorus. It’s not difficult to picture the entire band recording this while simultaneously bopping their heads in unison to the beat and beaming so widely that their molars are visible (kind of like those singing animatronic animals at Chuck E. Cheese). The cuteness becomes too much to endure when Gardner sings dainty “Doo doo doos” after asking repeatedly in his helium-tinted falsetto “Do ya love me?”

There is something to say about Guster's refreshing unpretentious quality. These guys aren’t putting on any airs of superiority or hinting at a dark underbelly of meaningful despair like so many of their forlorn martyred peers; Guster probably wouldn’t recognize moody if it came dancing interpretively into their studio naked. Easy Wonderful is a little too sunny of a glimpse into the happy-go-lucky utopia in which the band permanently resides.

All this cheeriness makes Easy Wonderful grating after a while. There is such thing as too much sweetness; it produces the same overbearing queasiness that inevitably comes after that third Snickers bar that you totally thought you could stomach, but now causes you to become ill at the sight of sweets. Case in point: On “Bad Bad World,” Gardner brings sugary naïveté to new heights when he sings “There is love / There is peace in this world” followed by his earnest proclamation “It isn’t such a bad, bad world!” You can almost see the yellow smiley faces and peace signs swirling in this guy’s brain as you gag from the heaping spoonful of sugar being poured down your throat.

One may wonder why a bunch of Jewish guys from Tufts University would float a few Jesus/quasi-biblical themes throughout the album (“Stay with Me Jesus,” “Jesus and Mary”). Sure, stranger things have happened, perhaps, but this intriguing turn is minimized considerably by the fierce, albeit annoying, optimism on this record.

Not since Ren and Stimpy’s “Happy Happy Joy Joy” has there been a musical product released with the same ecstatic message so relentlessly stated. By the time the final track “OK Alright” begins with another jaunty, cute-as-a-button piano riff and Gardner singing “Oh no, here we go,” you can’t help but agree. It’s time to go on a sugar-free diet.