True Swamp Neglect - Sleep Function Lost
(Superglider)
The sense of history—that is, history in some form of family tree of influneces—is lost when a British (or British-sounding) band with a penchant for oblique lyricism and an early-90s indie rock sound refers to itself as a "Pavement rip off." Maybe in my more naïve days I would have taken this as factual, as if Slanted and Enchanted would have been something wholly new and different for British audiences, but it seems like a willful negation of one's own cultural and musical past for a band like True Swamp Neglect to namecheck, rather than The Fall or The Wedding Present, a group influenced by those bands. In fact, it kind of weirds me out that Pavement would have more of a presence in England, in the underground circles, at least than The Fall—of course, all of this is based on merely what True Swamp Neglect writes on a press sheet, an NME article or two, the spate of cockney accents on the Pavement tribute album (largely a wasteland), and my ignorance of actual British trends and transatlantic crosspollination.
However, True Swamp Neglect sounds much like what I would have once called a Pavement rip-off, and now would call a Wedding Present rip-off; uncannily so. In fact enough so that I find it tough to feel any emotion towards this album or be intellectually interested in it; in the same way Spiral Stairs misses the boat on interesting lyricism, so too does this band, though where Kannberg was able to at least make the songs more musically interesting (and possibly this is due to his compatriots) or maybe just catchier than I've thought The Wedding Present was, True Swamp Neglect seems to adhere to the same formulas. A personal gripe too: the "rapping", the hip-hop influence that TSN wants to say is present in Sleep Function Lost—someone should listen to a Fall album. A decent album nonetheless, if thoroughly unengaging.
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