Photo by: VirginMedia.com

If OK Go is any indicator, even rock bands get tired of running after success.

OK Go is most famous for the pop-rock of “Here It Goes Again,” the staple song of the YouTube generation. During the music video, which has racked 48 million hits on YouTube to date, sees the four average Joes of the band perform a choreographed dance routine while singing on moving treadmills. Who could forget the Grammy-award-winning creativity of that music video?

Apparently, OK Go has been trying to for five years.

With album three, Of the Blue Colour of the Sky, the band abandons the energetic pop-rock sound it had so successfully crafted with “Here It Goes Again” and others for 13 low-key, less-interesting slow jams.

Colour of the Sky wastes no time in establishing the sound of the new OK Go. You would have never pegged the opener, “WTF?,” for an OK Go song – maybe a late-80s Prince instead. Yet on this album, it fits perfectly within the context.  After a few plays, the album actually becomes extremely catchy.

Unfortunately, few other songs on Colour of the Sky are as good. The ironic “This Too Shall Pass” makes you want to press the skip button, and “All is Not Lost” exemplifies one of many songs that would benefit from a firmer drumming backbone and faster tempo.

However, “Skyscrapers” takes OK Go’s new sound and perfects it. As the only memorable slow jam, it functions as the reference point to which all other tracks on this album should be compared. But none measure up to its sky-high lusciousness, and its sea of guitar riffs.

“White Knuckles” is equally good but more upbeat. The sound is close enough to “Here It Goes Again” to satisfy the masses, but it’s more progressive edge complements Colour of the Sky, and, for the first time on the record, OK Go doesn’t sound so blue.