New Albums From Train and Jason Mraz




Pick your poison: the simp or the cad. Being held through the night or getting a high five on the way out the door. Warm and fuzzy or cold and brusque. Pretty lies or ugly truth.


Jason Mraz, well, he would never hurt you. That’s been clear for years, but never more so than on his 2008 hit “I’m Yours,” a live show trifle that ended up becoming one of the most indelible pop songs of the last decade.


“I’m Yours” found an unlikely counterpart in “Hey, Soul Sister,” released the following year by the adult-contemporary rock band Train. Both were expressions of fealty, both used ukulele (or, at least, very tightly strung guitar), and both indicated the continuing vitality — if not originality — of soft rock, a genre maligned to the bones but stubborn.


But Mr. Mraz and Train, fronted by Pat Monahan, are not the same, not nearly so, as their new albums show. “Love Is a Four Letter Word” (Atlantic) is Mr. Mraz’s fourth and his most perplexing, and dense, relative to the warm directness of his previous work. It’s not an outright rejection of “I’m Yours,” but there’s nothing as direct or as uncomplicated. For Mr. Mraz this is a retreat.


Train, on the other hand, appears to have been energized by its brush with resurgent fame. “Hey, Soul Sister” was the band’s first major hit in eight years, and “California 37” (Columbia), its sixth album, resides gladly in its shadow, full of equally goofy songs, some more so.


At the time “Hey, Soul Sister” was easily the tackiest song written by the Norwegian songwriting-producing team Espionage, also responsible for Beyoncé’s “Irreplaceable.” Espionage returns here, co-producing the album with the pop-rock savant Butch Walker, and the template is much the same: full-bodied but light arrangements, coated in Mr. Monahan’s nagging yelp.


That he was able to achieve something like affection on “Hey, Soul Sister” — a reference to his “untrimmed chest” notwithstanding — was a surprise. For Mr. Mraz, though, loving embrace comes naturally. He doesn’t have a powerful voice, but it’s reassuring and tender, a good match for his genteel folk and reggae-inflected rock.


“I see a sunset on the beach/yeah, it makes me feel calm,” Mr. Mraz sings on “The Freedom Song,” which opens the new album, continuing, “when I’m calm I feel good/when I feel good I sing.”


And so it goes on this album, filled with platitudes and, eventually, psychobabble, dippy even by Mr. Mraz’s standards. On “Everything Is Sound” he proclaims, “We sing out to protest/and to project/and to harmonize with birds.” Mr. Mraz used to revel in wordplay, but here he’s more apt to pun. He sings, “From a bird’s eye view, I can see/it has a well-rounded personality.” What’s he singing about? The world.


There’s one welcome moment of friction on this album: “Who’s Thinking About You Now?” a loose James Talyor-influenced bit of light soul on which Mr. Mraz makes his case to a lover under a hint of a dark cloud. Just a hint, though.


Mr. Monahan, on the other hand, is all drizzle and sleet, a clumsy seducer more interested in looking in the mirror than in your eyes. When a woman leaves him on “50 Ways to Say Goodbye,” he says he’ll make excuses for her absence: “She went down in an airplane/fried getting suntan/fell in a cement mixer full of quicksand.” On “Bruises” he reconnects with an old friend. “Haven’t seen you since high school/Good to see you’re still beautiful/Gravity hasn’t started to pull quite yet,” he croons, adding, “I bet you’re rich as hell.” Even on the relatively straightforward post-breakup song “When the Fog Rolls In” he sounds smug.


These are pickup lines and breakup wishes irresistible only to the person saying them. They make up songs destined for music festivals at Sonoma wineries, where former live-hard-ers can reminisce about their more reckless younger days.


And yet they’re curiously effective, so confident in their misfires that they achieve a sort of insidious charm. They burst with self-regard, undimmed by even a moment’s reflection. On a couple of songs Mr. Monahan engages in a degree of autobiography that remains uncommon in mainstream rock, generally home to bland, frictionless moans of pleasure and pain or personal stories rendered opaquely, so that everyone can feel included.


Mr. Mraz has one song with this feel: “Frank D. Fixer,” about his grandfather — “He grew his own food and he could fix his own car” — but even though it’s about a real person, it feels like a fable.


Mr. Monahan’s first-person songs feel more specific, more absurd. The album opener, “This’ll Be My Year,” echoes Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start The Fire,” running down a chronology of significant world events, though in outrageously clunky form — “Boris Yeltsin chills, Freddie dies but Queen is still”; “Facebook joins the Internet, Oldsmobile joins the cassette” — and links them to the evolution of Train.


And then there’s the title song, which seethes with resentment at those who would have left him, and his band, for dead: “Here’s to those who didn’t think that Train could ever roll again/You were the fuel that I used when inspiration hit a dead end.” The candor is insipid, and almost admirable.