Fever Tree - Creation (25/9/19)

My original plan was to just do one album each night (unless the first one was somehow unsatisfying), but tonight's choice of Tarkus was based on cool cover art for an album i've never heard before, and since there's 2 rum and coke's for every can i'm more than happy to say this is an awesome cover for a band i never even knew existed (which for me is saying something). I hope i'm not disappointed...

... and the answer is "yes and no." The band is quite good and i want to hear their other 3 albums, but this album shows some definite disadvantages holding them back.

In no particular order:
- They can't seem to decide if they are pop-folk or blues-rock, which wouldn't be bad if they were recognizably the same band in both genres.

- the band is primarily a front for the producers/songwriters, and you can tell. There's a little something that just comes across as manufactured in every track. Like, a lyric that doesn't sound right, or a clearly contrived string arrangement. It genuinely sounds like Scott and Vivian Holtzman were workhorsedly imitating a particular band or song that was already popular, but they weren't creative enough to really do it right.

- there's no stylistic coherence to this album at all. One moment they sound like real contemporary rockers steppenwolf or iron butterfly (both bands we'll hear a lot in the near future, wink), the next they are singing a faux Neil Diamond ballad, then there's spanish guitar and trumpet, and tempo/meter shifts for no musically relevant reason.

So, to recap, if i just randomly picked any track from this album i'd say "that's really interesting," but when you smash them all together i think "is this a compilation album of the singer's session work?"

Oh well, it's certainly not the first time a cool cover left me feeling underwhelmed, but i definitely wouldn't call any particular track terrible. We'll give it a good solid "meh." At the very least, i had a lot to say about it, and that should count for something ;)

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSnEc0eT1ST4r2gfwpCDSlW23NPciQDdD

Next

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The 4 Seasons - The Genuine Imitation Life Gazette

Image
This might be my longest  album review ever. But i swear a couple times, so it's worth the read ;) How could i possibly mention Jefferson Airplane, The 4 Seasons, and Frank Zappa in the same context? Zappa said "this is rediculous" and a few years later The 4 Seasons said "you know what, Frank is right. This IS ridiculous." To which Jefferson Airplane said, "Oh. Ok. Got it." The real question is: which one is the most transgressive? Zappa said stop fighting, you look like idiots. Jefferson Airplane said i guess if love and community is a bad thing, then sure we're criminals and we'd be happy to move out into the fields and live peaceful lives without your garbage, let us go already. The 4 Seasons said hold my champagne for a moment. In 1969, The 4 Seasons released the single most ironic, acidic, extravagant, and downright befuddling album ever created, The Genuine Imitation Life Gazette. Zappa was accused of writing "shitty doo-w
Read more

Welcome to my blog, and my record collection.

This is a blog about my love of listening to albums. It started off as a nightly perusal of my dad's record collection (which sadly became mine) on my personal facebook page. Over the last two months it has become quite an enjoyable process of simply ranting about what i think is a real art form, the album. It needs a more permanent home. Some of my reviews are positive, some negative. They might not be what you expect from album reviews, but i hope you at least find them entertaining. For the most part i do very little research, and they tend to be train of thought reactions rather than calculated essays. If nothing else, know that i'm really listening to them and whether they are amazing or abysmal i want you to go listen to them too.  I'll start migrating the 60+ i've written so far over here in the next few days, and hopefully get to the point where i just start writing them here. I'd probably even take suggestions if you're just dying to know my tho
Read more

Pat Benatar - Seven The Hard Way

Image
I don't know about you, but i love Pat Benatar. Yes, that's also her debut album with the single most underrated song in the universe (My Clone Sleeps Alone) in the background, but that's just a generic non-self-titled debut album. We're jumping ahead to her 6th album, Seven The Hard Way, because that, ladies and gentle germs, is how you kalaidescope a concept. Not one, not two, not three, but 4 protien-packed layers to this metaphor. You don't really need to know the overly complicated rules of Craps to know that A) it's gambling, B) "the hard way" refers to rolling doubles, so good luck rolling two 3.5s, and C) you're going to lose, one way or another. It's a joke, but more importantly, it's Pat Benatar and the roll out is Sex As A Weapon, so the innuendo is not intended to be subtle. Wait wait wait, that's only 3, Bottle, where's 4? You're right, last but not least, side B opens with Seven Rooms of Gloom, a Holland-Dozier-Hol
Read more