Album Review: Sample Answer - Good Boy

Approachable, inoffensive, accessible — there's a reason these words sound like criticisms.

To make something interesting, even pop music, is to make something challenging. It's a lesson Sample Answer has yet to learn. The EP's title track is a dispiriting by-the-numbers affair that starts with that classic failure of imagination: a whistle. Proud is watery would-be white rap. Textile Baby has a bit of swing and snap but is, at heart, pedestrian. Art needn't be offensive or brutal or oblique, but to be of any value it needs to issue a challenge to what has come before. Sample Answer's great failure is the choice to play it safe.