Day 54: NSYNC – No Strings Attached
Album cover courtesy of Jive Records
I don’t know if it’s just me, but this week has been long. The period between Monday and Friday has felt about four weeks long with no weekends in between. And for no good reason either—it’s been a perfectly fine week, just very, very long.
My brain is only half-working at this stage, so I thought I’d choose the most mindless listening I could find, something silly, something that I won’t even want to analyse at too high of a level. So today I’m reviewing one of my childhood favourite bands: NSYNC. Because if I can appreciate it as a 7-year-old, I’m sure I can appreciate it on a day like today.
It starts off very strong — “Bye Bye Bye” and “It’s Gonna Be Me” are evergreen. Then starts the slightly wobblier bits. I definitely didn’t remember that there’s a song about taking a space ride with a space cowboy.
During my last listen, I was also too young to get the wink-wink nudge-nudge content from the album, like “Digital Get Down”. It’s about cybersex as it was in the year 2000. It’s not aged as badly as it might have, aside from the space-age noises and autotune and the part about leaving horny voicemails and saying that she’s “Bouncin' me from satellite to satellite”, but you know, other than that.
Do I love NSYNC? Yes, absolutely, but mainly because of the nostalgia. The other part is that they have those evergreen pop songs, like the aforementioned “Bye Bye Bye”. And that band did give us Justin Timberlake, who does have some actually great solo records and who did give us the “this is gonna ruin the tour”-meme. Band-wise, it was a gift and it has given us as much as it possibly can.
But in the grand scheme of things, I’m not really able to give it more than a 5.5/10. It’s inoffensive, it’s occasionally catchy, there are some classics of the genre, but it’s almost a bit too inoffensive to be enjoyed as an adult. The first two songs are bangers, then it just starts to get a little bit boring and ballad-y, I was sort of wishing to be done with it at the tail end of the record. I’ll still be happy when I hear NSYNC’s hits, but let’s face it, a whole album is a little bit much.