Learn to trust your first instincts. Somber cello equals no fun. When a quirky, faux-jazz lite guitar riff livens up the mix on "Oil Pack," the opening track, however, you may be tricked into thinking that this might be fun. The cello extends itself into a rising, meandering melody, anchored by the simplicity of the guitar counterpoint. Its engaging and pleasing. But once the fun of the opening number a fades away with the music, all you have left is the rest of the album. Which is very, very serious.
According to the promo sheet accompanying this CD, "Terminal 4 is the newest of a series of bands created by Fred Lonberg-Holm." I don’t see how anyone can argue with that. He supplies the cello and the arrangements while dudes from bands like Vandermark 5 and Town and Country play some other instruments like guitars, drums, and bass. If you are like me, maybe you know who these guys are and maybe you don’t. Fortunately, the aforementioned promo sheet informs us that "[a]nyone who has followed the Independent music scene over the last ten years has certainly heard of Fred Lonberg-Holm." Have you? If so, perhaps you should replace me at this fine publication.
What Fred gives us is eight slow, smoky jazz-tinged pop tunes (pop in the sense of olde-tyme pop music when jazz orchestra leaders were pop musicians, not pop in the sense of Blink-182). "She Caught Herself" even features an exotic chanteuse (Terria Gartelos) crooning like late-night along to Terminal 4’s hipper-than-yesterday, sparse accompaniment. "This Was the Frippe Time," has a bittersweet lyricism, established by the cello and repeated on trombone, accented by abstract guitar flourishes a la Mick from the Dirty Three (sadly, though, no magma 21st Century Schizoid riffage).
About half of the songs gel into a nice emotional scene, and about have never find their path and peter out. Terminal 4 seem like they have some good ideas, and a healthy sense of popular musics. What they lack is compulsion. The songs meander. Not like they are taking their time and enjoying the scenery, but like they have nowhere to go but inside their own selves. Which is kind of funny, because this record is on a label called Truckstop.
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