Ryan Ferguson is a former No Knife member turned singer songwriter. To those of you familiar with No Knife, you know that they’re fairly edgy and punky indie rock, comparable to Cursive, Jimmy Eat World and Sunny Day. Well, Ferguson is like No Knife minus the punkiness or the edginess. Ferguson is No Knife Lite.

By shedding all that stuff that made No Knife interesting, No Knife Lite easily falls into the void of indie rock mediocrity. Only Trying to Help is a simple, pleasant listen at best. It’s an unfortunate, boring listen at worst.

The most memorable chorus on the album is found on the first track, “Remission.” It variates between “And he takes / a life / but I’m not ready (indiscernible lyric)” and “So we take / a knife / and cut out pieces that don’t seem right” with a slightly annoying piano line behind Ferguson’s distorted and muffled voice (also found in every other track). None of the others songs have randomly popped into my head days after listening to the album, that’s for sure.

Various elements from other bands like Pinback (some voice distortions sound eerily like Rob Crow’s scattered throughout the album), Beach Boys (backup vocals going oo-o-oo’s in several songs), Muse (strong piano keys in some songs and an Muse-like 80’s keyboard in “Introduction”), Dashboard Confessional (“Must be Friday Night” could have totally been written by Chris Carabba), Weezer (guitar riff in “Better Off” mimics Rivers’ style) and, of course, No Knife (and all of their influences). All those elements just add up to one big mediocre mush.

Ferguson gets props for writing all the music and playing all the instruments on the album himself. He’s clearly a good musician who has high ambitions: “My goal was to write a real powerful record, one that people won’t forget too easily.” Unfortunately for him, and for us, he failed to do just that.

LISTEN: Introduction and Remission on Myspace

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