Genre: Punk, alternative rock
Don’t fear, dear rock n’ roll listener! All of the news about your favourite dead singer coming back to life as an AI-powered patch, a hologram, or a mascot for a brand-approved tribute band should not scare you.
We may have to accept it. Pop music has inched toward the future as far as it could go. We’ve reached our destination. And it’s all a bit underwhelming. It’s time to trek back. There’s no better place to start our process of reconnection than with music, the lifeblood of our society.
Jovi Skyler’s must’ve felt the icy breath of modernity too. From a musical perspective, “Nothing to Do” is a reaction to what pop music claims it can deliver and invariably fails. It’s a call back to 90s rock, an era that many will bitterly claim was the very last time that music was any good.
This tactic isn’t merely designed for nostalgia purposes. There’s plenty on Skyler’s mind. Like the best grunge artists, those pressures make themselves hard to ignore and produce the tension needed to create the 10-song collection found on “Nothing to Do.”
Album opener “If You Think So” reckons with life’s additions, including the one for romantic affection. It’s a song propelled by the loud-soft dynamics that would make Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain smile approvingly.
“Nervosa” and “Got It Wrong” give the distortion pedal a workout. The songs gleam with the kind of anger that forces an artist either to produce their best work or drive them to madness.
On “Danger Land,” “Never Wanted”, or “Evergreen,” Skyler works with the kind of vocal grit that turned Chris Cornell or Layne Staley into heroes of modern singers. It’s likely the tone that vocal teachers are most often requested to teach.
Still, Jovi Skyler’s thoughts aren’t all stuck on the past. The songwriter, as did his heroes, that friction is needed in order to create great work. In this era of modern uncertainty, there’s plenty to be found and mined for compositions.
“Virtual Reality” is a song in which the artist decries his generation’s appetite for computer-projected thrills that never amount to fulfilment. Meanwhile, “Rocket” looks into the issues of vanity and ambition while Skyler provides his best Axl Rose impression for the song’s chorus.
What does it all amount to? The song closer “Survivor” aims to make sense of all the thoughts weighing on the songwriter’s mind. Plenty of things have conspired against Skyler’s happiness, but “Nothing to Do” is a testament to the old-fashioned punk ideal of just doing yourself and doing for yourself.
At least in that, there’s some truth! Jovi Skyler has gone searching for it on “Nothing to Do” and revealed, in the process, that there’s less to fear about the world around us than we may have initially thought.
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