Bedroom Walls - I Saw You Coming Back To Me
(Giant Pets)
OK, so naming your album after one of my favorite Jefferson Airplane songs is gonna win you brownie points, but hiding behind a megaphone can't disguise the fact that "Winter, That's All" is a blatant Luna ripoff. Still, I think even Dean-o "Vino" Wareham would admit this El Lay band has got his musical arrangement down pat, so we'll give it a cautionary thumbs up. Just don't make a habit of it and lose the "Winchester Cathedral" vocal technique next time. The twee duet between guitarist/vocalist/songwriter Adam Goldman and ex-keyboardist Melissa Thorne (that's right... more in a moment) on "The Dog's Life" is almost too delicate for its own good, like Holiday Flyer or any number of those anonymous, fey Darla bands. Perhaps realizing the dangerously hopeless direction they're heading in, the band pulls a total about face on "More 'Real Cats'" (the title refers to their publishing company), a multi-directional pastiche of instrumental passages that'll please former Tortoise fans who rue the day they abandoned the rock idiom and turned into a boring jazz band.
"There's Nothing To See In The Morning Light" is another instrumental, this time a lazy floater for whiling away hot summer afternoons in a backyard hammock, although what that inaudible nonsense at the end is, I have no idea. "Landlord! Watch! Coffin! Angels!" (geez, these titles—I guess that's what happens when you're essentially an instrumental band and need to come up with something to distinguish the songs from one another) is a slow-poke waltz across the Ponderosa, complete with back-porch whistling, and "Making Atoms Jump Like Trick Dogs" (see what I mean about the titles?) continues Goldman's frustrating start/stop, stutter-step approach to composition that makes almost every track sound like three or four songs edited together to form a single track. Inevitably, the parts are much stronger than the whole, and we're left with an unsettling listening experience where songs end and begin in the unlikeliest of places. On the latter, I thought the song ended about four or five different times before I saw the track indicator change!
Don't get me wrong, the segments are gorgeous (the band coined the fairly accurate term "romanticore" to describe their sound), it's just the editing and assemblage that needs work. And those brownie points I gave them earlier are hereby forfeited for not giving the aforementioned Thorne more to do. I could listen to her delicately whispered, sexy, coo-coo-ca-choos on closer, "I've Been Thinking A Lot About Dots On The Wall" all day long. Unfortunately, Goldman is the only remaining member of the band that recorded this album, as drummer Julian Gross has hightailed it over to godawful NYC hype mongers, Liars, and Thorne, who has a Masters degree in Fine Arts from the California Institute of the Arts seems to have returned to her first love, painting. It remains to be heard what their five(!) replacements will sound like next time, but until Goldman can learn to string his beautiful segments together into a complete "song," I'm gonna have to suggest borrowing a friend's copy before deciding to purchase your own.
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