Review: Like A Fox – Where’s My Golden Arm?

Originally published in Delusions of Adequacy Jan. 19, 2009

Apologies for sounding like a broken record or an oversimplified lecture on aesthetics but there seem to be at least two distinct castes within the contemporary world of independent music, two different sides to the multi-faceted underground. There are the bands, outfits and musicians whose work is heralded by smaller labels because their sensibilities or their sound exist, sometimes proudly, outside or beyond “mainstream” interests. And there are those who more closely mirror and sometimes imitate those “mainstream” interests and whose work – good, bad, indifferent – sounds like it is (merely?) waiting to be picked up or championed beyond that underground. Fair enough? Like A Fox, the Philadelphia-based band that just released its sophomore outing, is, to put it kindly, among the latter.

There isn’t anything terribly bad about Where’s My Golden Arm?, an 11-song offering released by Transit of Venus in partnership with Empyrean Records. But there isn’t much terribly great about it, either. The disc is a collection of mostly agreeable, mostly humming-friendly pop-rock songs that were cut and studio-polished largely to be disseminated over radio airwaves. Its only big concept seems to be accessibility. There’s rarely a note or a bridge out of place, and the performers and engineers have thrown together a serious collection of studio production tricks to flesh out the package, presumably under the guise of atmosphere. (The band’s press material touts the group as psychedelic rock/pop, one would imagine because of these sonic flourishes. I don’t think I quite buy it.) Many eras boast musicians who yearn to be John Lennon. Jay Laughlin, the multi-instrumentalist at the heart of Like A Fox, might be better said to emulate Peter Frampton; this has stadium ambitions.

If that’s your bag, well, then, this is your record. You’ll get plenty of big-chorus stadium rock (“On The Way,” “Heard The Shot”), light-hearted pop that impersonates the more innocent strains of 60s surf-pop (“Night Person”) and numbers that bounce between shuffling acoustics and barn-burning guitar solos (“A Feeling That Launched A Thousand Wars”) “Time Stands Still,” despite the poppy verses, features full-throttle guitar figures that pay homage to Lynyrd Skynyrd; “Heard The Shot” and “Been Sitting There,” with their palm-muted guitars, owe debts to The Cars.

One of the worst things you could probably say about the record, though, is that it’s a paint-by-numbers affair. No matter how evocative that out-of-place pseudo-instrumental passage in “Gold” is, with its expanding guitars, synths and ooh-la-la-la-la vocals, you just know these guys are going to go in for the kill again and again with a certain formula on the next song. (And the next.) There seems to be a genuine artistic appetite on display here. It’s just that it mostly hungers for acceptance. The band, which mostly consists of Laughlin, displays no sense of adventure, no longing to stray from the all-too-familiar path of the pop-rock refrain. Laughlin hits the right notes and then some, sings with a semi-affected boyish delivery, and serves up the chorus with all of the accent marks cemented in place. But, isn’t there more to independent music than this?

The record ends not with a verse-chorus-verse mold but with the dreamy and unexpected “Just A Light Hit,” which feels like an odd marriage between Pink Floyd and Faith No More. It’s a really interesting choice, a great song and one of the few moments to diverge from formula, but it’s not enough to save the record. This is a pop-rock record with choruses to peddle and radio playlists to fill. Mainstream, here they come.

Review: The Santiago Steps – Okay Okay Okay

Originally published in Delusions of Adequacy Jan. 30, 2009

Talk about misleading or false impressions. The first song off Okay Okay Okay, the third outing from California’s The Santiago Steps, starts the proceedings just the way you’d hope an album-opener would. The song— titled, simply, “Boardwalk”—begins with an emotive, if understated, progression on acoustic guitar, an almost hesitant repetition, alongside casual bass and some equally casual vocal cooing. In some two minutes, a too-short two minutes, it gradually expands to include a borderline-haunting piano motif and violin that moans and swoons over the verses. (In that loosely woven sort of way, it almost feels like a forgotten instrumental from Songs: Ohia.)  The record’s eleventh track, which helps book-end the 36-minute disc, is a song of a similar color, an introspective offering defined by repeating guitar figures, spare notes on piano, and wordless vocals.

So Okay Okay Okay both begins and ends with shades of low-fi folk-pop, something off-handed and engaging. The problem, for lack of a better word, is often what falls between.

About half of the nine tracks that take place after “Boardwalk” but before the closing “Song for the Sea” are perfectly, perfectly fine: they’re well-played, well-constructed pop-rock songs, some made better by the added texture of a trumpet or the thrust of an emotional, instrumental bridge. But they can suffer from a lack of daring, a lack of desire to break the mold. We’re treated to bouncy power-pop (“Love Is Small,” “Way Away”), full-throttled, guitar-crunched rock (“Breaking Ranks”), acoustic balladeering (“What We Left In The Trunk”), even a little unexpected foray into funk (“Gone Away”). But the songs – or, more appropriately, the songwriters and the performers behind them – largely tend to play it safe, opting to rarely stray from pre-established formula. As a result, there’s little momentum, like a car floating in neutral as it wanders toward its eventual destination.

When The Santiago Steps do wander off the beaten path and break free of genre cliches, the result is much more inviting.  “Giving Way,” with its thudding percussion and digitally delayed shards of electric guitar, gets the blood flowing, even in eerily quiet moments when all you’ll hear is multi-tracked vocal harmonies, anxious bass and the distant whistle of a synthesizer. The timid “Red Mountain,” where reverb-heavy guitars and dreamy bass lead the way, flirts with something beautiful but runs a ridiculously abbreviated 49 seconds. The violin and breathy vocals steal the spotlight on the rootsy “Flatlands.” These moments should be celebrated and the listener likely will wish they were more in abundance. Why fall back on formula when you can do this instead? The answer is hard to find on Okay Okay Okay, a spotty record that’s only sometimes full of heart.

Some of the trouble with Okay Okay Okay is on display with a song like “Strange Obligation.” The record’s third song, it starts with a degree of promise — a jangly bit of electric guitar, complimentary male and female vocals – and comes to include bass, drums and violin, all in place, all well-played. There’s even something catchy and memorable about the song, maybe in the way that violin snakes between the vocals. But it never quite catches, instead merely shuffling through the verses and choruses. (Any semblance of subtle beauty is stamped out by the rock n’ roll testosterone of “Breaking Ranks,” which immediately follows it.) It’s not that the song is broken. You just wish it was given the same emotional punch of that album-opener.

Review: Skeletons – Money

Rejoice, lovers of broken beauty, rejoice!

The Brooklyn quartet Skeletons has released a record so profound in its disjointedness, so dedicated to its skittering grace, you’ll spend the rest of the year trying to foolishly put together the pieces and make sense of it all. It’s called Money but, even if there’s a treatise on the evils of capitalism and free market economies lurking below the surface – yes, yes, we’ll get to that in a minute – the band certainly doesn’t let a lofty message slur the vitriol of the proceedings.

All said, the Tomlab record, all 53 minutes of it, is a manic pastiche of jazz, post rock and tabletop avant-noise, a carefully composed selection of 10 songs disguised as a series of free-form improvisations teetering on the brink of chaos. In short, these men want to convince us they’re mad and we’re the better for it. And they succeed.

There’s Gastr del Sol piano explorations tinged with a chorus of car horns (“Fill My Pockets Full”), Minutemen-style funk freakouts (the intro to “The Things”) and perverse, Bizarro-world reggae exercises (“Stepper a.k.a. Work”). And that’s in the first four songs. The mind-boggingly good “Ripper a.k.a The Pillows,” with its clattering guitars, omnipresent tom rolls and haunting melodies, borrows a sense of impending doom from Sleepytime Gorilla Museum or, better yet, the darker sequences from A Clockwork Orange. The vast majority of the 11-minute “Booom! (Money),” another gem waiting for the right listener’s ears, is delivered in a desperate, frantic crescendo; each note is a last breath on death row.

Elsewhere, the band tones down the multi-faceted approach and settles more comfortably into the well-worn terrain of a genre, however strange. “The Masks,” all reverbed guitars and hypnotic, benzo-sleepy backing vocals, is a 3 a.m. doo-wop outtake filtered through a dream. The toe-tapping funk of “The Things,” which, alongside Ornette Coleman horn-blasts, delivers biting lines like, “Why would I want to know/ these things the parents of your parents’ parents’ parents know/ these things the children of rich men know?” goes as much for the hips as the head.

Which brings us to that message. Skeletons may be condemning the modern machinations of American society but, if that’s the case, they might be doing it more in an aesthetic than literal fashion. The lyrics or, more appropriately, what you can hear of the lyrics, touch on themes of how money drives us (“Working, working, working … and I’m gonna get paid/ enough to survive”) but it doesn’t seem like we’re not treated to any of the anti-consumerist insinuations of Cheer-Accident’s Enduring The American Dream, from which these guys might have cribbed.

So, where does that leave us?

After somber chants (“Unrelentinglessness”) and a brief interlude of percussive asides (the minute-long “Lullaby”), the record ends in fantastic fashion with “Eleven (It’ll Rain).” The piece begins with a resolute acoustic refrain and features an extended, well-shaped tropicalia passage, but it’s the middle section that will fascinate you. There, a softly strummed and dissonant guitar and off-hand lyrics (“You said there’s not a plant that speaks more honestly/ than does, than does the money tree”) buckle under waves of slashed-up white noise and increasingly panicked vocals until the world begins to feel like the onset of a panic attack, all hyper-alert pupils and cold, sweaty hands. It’s a disconcerting moment and designed as such. Skeletons seems to have figured out that what unsettles us can be just as moving as heartfelt platitudes. Consider Money exhibit A.