Bobby Birdman - Born Free Forever
(Hush)
I have a habit of holding up The Microphones as the last bastion of pop music for some reason. And then of comparing all the indie pop I receive to them as if they were the bellwethers of future pop. And then I hear an album like Bobby Birdman's Born Free Forever, and for some reason, I automatically want to disparage it because it sounds too much like Elvrum's project. Well, regardless of what I've either intimated or outright stated in the past, The Microphones are not the saviors of the pop format and Born Free Forever is a good album even if it sounds like them: more confident vocals, not at all lo-fi, and with a nice 70s prog keyboard in "I Hope/I Grow", but still, essentially Microphones-ish in underlying form, and since Rob Kieswetter, he who is Bobby Birdman, has worked within the Pacific Northwest/K Recs/Knw-Yr-Own scene, I doubt he himself would find the comparison to be unwarranted or unwelcome. My only complaint though, and I leveled this same criticism at The Scientifics in this issue, is that, due to an unwavering tempo, the album has no sense of movement, something which seems less dire in this instance where the songs are better composed and where the vocalist has a better sense of melody, but still, getting through the entire album might be a tedious affair for some. The lag though is most often countered with Kieswetter's good sense of space and atmosphere and his arrangements, which help to staunch the torpid velocity.
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