Labels: Kindercore
Review by: Andy Malcolm
Well. Just in case you hadn’t figured out that Davey was singing on this record earlier, track 7 consists mainly of him singing “I’m not as good as the interstates are, I just can’t take you that far” and a couple of other words from that song which you’ve heard a thousand times before, it’s one of the songs which lives in my head from time to time. Anyway, I was quite impressed, it’s like remixing your own song without paying some high falutin’ DJ buffoon to do it for you.
Maybe I should have started the review a bit more formally. Ok – this record is two members of the Promise Ring and one member of Pele doing the acoustic thing. Your tolerance for it can be immediately gauged on how you stand with regards to Mr. von Bohlen’s vocal style, and maybe also if you like twinkly acoustic stuff. If you think von Bohlen couldn’t sing an entire song in tune even if you put a pistol to his balding head, don’t even consider buying this. If you think he is the greatest singer in rock history and would glady bear his children, 8 of them even, then go ahead, make the purchase. No-one falls anywhere between these two posts by the way, and that’s a fact.
If you’ve heard the Vermont song on the split with Ida, don’t expect anything similar here. This is much more basic stuff, more stripped, less poppy, relying on the warm strums generated from the guitars to create the Autumnnal mood. For an overall sound, if you like the slowest songs off “Very Emergency” then you got a bit of that going on, there are touches of the Joan of Arc acoustic sound (Davey even tries to do some hopelessly ‘wrong’ Kinsella (T) style vocals at the start of one song), a bit of the style of the new American Football CD, and well. It’s hard to describe really, it’s just music.
And as you’d expect from a Davey project, there’s the usual assortment of quirky lyrics and song titles, such as “Indiana Jones” – ‘I wonder if any Indiana Jones movies come on tonight’, a song named after legendary Jets QB, “Broadway Joe” Namath, and a typical VB play on words title “Bee, Leave Me”.
A nice little album, non-essential, will probably only shift copies to Promise Ring fanatics, and will be enjoyed by any of them that don’t come in expecting it to be exactly like how old P-Ring was. But this has me skipping down stairs in one minute, then staring out of the window, lost, in another. Nice.