ARTSETC.
Head of Femur creates bare-bones pop music on latest
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Also by Steve Lampiris:
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by Steve Lampiris
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
With the odd name of Head of Femur comes the equally odd
album, Great Plains.
Actually, “album” may, in fact, be the wrong word for this
collection of songs. Plains is more or
less a history of pop music in 13 songs. The title track is a Nick Lowe-esque
power pop ditty, there’s ’70s orchestral pop (“By the Red Fire”) and even a
reference to today’s music with a quasi-Shins track (“Where’s the Fire”).
A good portion of the record, though, finds the band playing
a bastardized hybrid of Nick Lowe tunage filtered through the lyrical
discussions of everyday life as seen by Mike Ness. A line like, “And you have
to remember to laugh when you bounce a check/ And you got to remember to laugh
when you can’t pay your rent,” from the late album highlight “This Message,”
wouldn’t be out of place on a Social Distortion record.
One would think that this approach would create a total lack
of album cohesion. And one would be wrong. The record plays like an audio
encyclopedia for those interested in music before their own time.
Now, one could just go back and listen to the artists and
albums that inspired Head of Femur, but that takes all the fun out of this
album of appreciation. Not only does Head of Femur manage to lift up those
classic artists they so clearly wear on their collective sleeve, but they also
manage to reinvent the wheel (and the axle).
While they do borrow the pop templates of many different
styles and artists, the band finds a way to put their own spin on them. And it’s
not so obvious upon the first listen, either. “Jetway Junior,” for example,
sounds like Femur’s take on Elvis Costello, but then 70 seconds into it comes a
sax solo out of nowhere — and it’s great.
Interestingly enough, the band knows what is too much for a
song. Most of their songs consist of the usual rock setup of guitar-bass-drums.
That said, some songs have a spice here or there thrown in for that extra Emeril
“Bam!” A song like “Isn’t It a Shame” has a horn section in the back just to
bring out every little piece of the song, no matter how small. Such melodic
finesse is a real strength of this record.
But perhaps the best thing about the album is the fact that
the band knows how to make an album flow start to finish. The track order is
flawless, to the point where a listener would conclude at the end that it could
not have been in any other order. Simply put, the album unfolds like the
perfect novel that doesn’t yet exist for this very dreamlike collection.
The musical highs and lows — tempo and style, that is, not
quality — are balanced perfectly along the 47-minute journey. It really is
incredible how many times I found myself thinking, “Yep, this makes sense” when
spinning this record a second, third and fourth time.
Indeed, this album is not only an overview of pop music in
general, but also a confirmation that it still exists today and that pop can
still be fantastic in 2008.
4 1/2 stars out of 5
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