The Feud - Language is Technology
(Insidious Plot)
Do you like Don Caballero? Me too. Do you like Ganger? Yeah, they were not so bad. A few exceptions beside, do you think that progy/mathy-type rock is mundane in its pretension and tedious in execution? Most certainly. Is it smart or is it intense? In straddling the two, generally, it's neither.
The dark arts of progressive rock have ruined many a skilled musician. For every band who successfully explores this insidious science, there are ten that—unintentionally—create pure joke music, hard to listen to because of its off-putting audacity and ostentatiousness. After my first exposure to The Feud, prior to this album, I had marginalized The Feud as simply being one of the unsuccessful hacks, creating tedious music by trying to bring prog ideas into a post-hardcore reference model. Perhaps good musicians, perhaps with a few good ideas, but still bad for all the reasons prog is justifiably maligned.
With the band's new album, Language is Technology, there a few moments—a few really decent songs—where The Feud surprises me and makes me reassess their merits. The band blends frenzied and mellow sections in "Tidy Sum (A Brilliant Idea For A)." A blast of aggro-metal textures fill the beginning of the song before the blurts of sax shift to gentle drifts of tone. Those gentle drifts threaten a cliched build, but wisely never attempt to overwhelm the synapses and just provide a dense, interesting bed of sounds.
However, despite the few great songs, much of the album leaves me unimpressed, as the band too often degrades into simple but fast-paced guitar parts and repetition that fails to entrance. That is, they too often degrade into the less sweaty parts of a Sweep the Leg Johnny song.
|
