Putting us to sleep

Jack Johnson's music is the equivalent of the beach in Corona commercials: pleasant, unchanging, anonymous and happily oblivious to the stuff of real life. Although the tropical fantasy is appealing while working in a cubicle or trudging through slush, sitting on the same beach forever becomes boring. \nHampered by his very limited vocal range, Johnson's songs have a habit of blurring together. The first track on Sleeping Through the Static, "All at Once," is a bit of an exception. It has more depth and movement than the familiar click and clack of your average Johnson white-reggae-on-Vicodin song, but the formula is already falling into place: languid, staccato half-singing over muted, primarily major chords. \nA line in "All at Once" catches: "It seems like the heart is no place to be singing from at all." The song begins to seem very similar to one by that other pop stalwart John Mayer: "Waiting on the World to Change." Both artists try to sum up the contemporary feeling -- a vague dissatisfaction with America's precarious position in the world and a sad feeling of powerlessness at doing anything about it -- in a way that's friendly enough for top-40 radio. This feeling is swooping, subtly, throughout popular music: Wilco, Feist and even Radiohead have also recently made stripped-down, tastefully restrained albums for a hyper-speed, hyper-complex, hyper-technological time. \nJohnson continues to sprinkle anti-war sentiment throughout the album, later chanting "We went beyond where we should've gone." Suddenly, the formula attempts to stretch further. Though Johnson's music is consistently inoffensive, some light political disaffection gets thrown in to keep things from becoming saccharine -- the perfect ambiance for Starbucks and Panera Bread. \nStill, to really touch anyone, even quiet, amiable music has to have some cojones. By the album's midway point, the songs are nearly indistinguishable. This is a collection of inert songs from a musician who has been remaking the same album for eight years. Like the faceless sunbathers on Corona Beach, these songs, and this album, go nowhere.