Phantom Planet - Raise the Dead

Raise the Dead (2008, Fueled By Ramen) Phantom Planet's fourth studio album. **1/2

Unfortunately, Raise the Dead is probably going to stand as one of the biggest let-downs of 2008. With the first and title track, the album starts out amazingly, an acoustic ballad gradually gaining speed and sound with extremely emotional vocals. Even here though, the nagging sense that something is wrong is already at hand; the song may seem good on the surface, and even though it's only four and a half minutes long, but when it begins to near the end, you want it to end, and the entire album becomes an affair of this sort, as the songwriting only goes downhill from that point. It has a distinct Muse sound to it, though the lyrics of doom and gloom are absent. Some may see this as a relief, hard to say, because it's not like any lyrics here save or help the album.