Ral Partha Vogelbacher - The More Nice Fey Elven Gnomes are Hiding in My Toilet Again
(Megalon)
This is what happens when the Dungeons & Dragons Friday night play group gets too old to play Dungeons ∧ Dragons. They still get together every Friday, but instead of breaking out the 12-sided dice, they break out 12-stringed guitars and try to set their stories of elven adventures to song.
"Do-do-do do-do kicker of elves..." Guided by Voices' best songs (also known as Bee Thousand) were chocked full of this sort of geek imagery, and Ral Partha knows whose footsteps they are following (check the name-call in the song title "Sadko Seeks the Oracle of Rockathon"). However, while Pollard and company always kept their homemade songs short, letting bad ideas be less bothersome, Ral Partha totally envelops themselves in one big, bad idea. In fact, this album, The More Nice Fey Elven Gnomes are Hiding in My Toilet Again, is promised to be only part 1 in a four part series on this bad idea.
However, too-geeky-to-be-good ideas can still have their charm, and some of the songs here work fine as standalone pieces, instead of just a part of their grand concept quadruple album. The music is simple and bare, plain folk played on various types of guitars with several songs that add a little bit of early 90s indie rock. The sounds of the instruments almost has more impact than the riffs that are played, like a Hawaiian guitar sound on "To Every King, a Deathbed, To Every Siege, a Victor," the folky twang of "Dungeons, Broken Spirits," or the electric sound on "Vasilador! Sadko! Vasilador!" The music itself is only occasionally more than a simple guitar part. This can still make for an interesting song, like on "The Sunshine Hates Sadko's Guts and Wants to Eat His Brains," where the guitar is a simple twee jangle, but the lyrics and sway to the song make it enjoyable.
Much like Helium's recent records, Ral Partha Vogelbacher is trying to cast their problems into an elaborate imaginary universe. Ral Partha does a better job of making their imagery of this universe palatable, however, musically, Ral Partha is just not interesting enough. The album goes by quickly at under 25 minutes in length, but there are few sounds that catch the ear, making it hard to get wrapped up in this fable of gnomes.
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