Friday, May 25, 2007

Off the cliffs and way, way down.

Guillemots, From the Cliffs (2006) [5.3]
Much like the Fiery Furnaces' early 2005 release, Guillemots' From the Cliffs is an EP in theory far more than it is in practice. Clocking in at a little over 40 minutes, it stands as being several minutes longer than a handful of recent full-lengths. While this move is very economical in that it provides listeners with more music for less moolah, hindsight proves it would have been the best thing for the band to just create an actual 20-or-so minute EP and save their listeners the chore of having to sit through the remainder of the present material. The problem is obvious: although we have an LP masquerading as an EP, we only have enough inspiration to fill the shoes of the shorter medium. And the way the band chooses to reveal this to us is to place all of the really good stuff right at the beginning, then immediately plunge us into a giant pool of soporific boredom.

Ignoring the pointless first track (which clocks in at a monstrous 39 seconds and goes nowhere, making it by default one of the album's best tracks because it wastes no time going nowhere), the disc kicks off with what I honestly consider to be one of the finest songs yet produced by any band this decade, the devastatingly well-written "Trains to Brazil." A brilliant pop song that is both lyrically poetic and musically appealing, it details the reactions of one man as he learns his friend has died in the London subway bombings. Even though I placed it at #4 on my Best Songs of 2006 list, it still felt like I was criminally underrating it. Following this song on a tracklist is an unenviable task for any other track, but the boys do a surprisingly good job tackling the challenge. "Made-Up Lovesong #43" is perhaps one of the most idiosyncratic love songs in recent memory, but its charm rests entirely within that quality. The only problem I have with the song is that it's a full minute longer than it should have been; a truncation at the 2:45 mark would have been far more effective than the draggy, slowed-down conclusion they actually put on it. Nonetheless, this is nitpicking.

What isn't nitpicking is that the rest of the album is populated with a bunch of really, really, really long songs (we're talking multiple 7-9 minute tracks, here) that are sloooooow and almost entirely unsatisfying, not to mention unmemorable. By the time the last song is over, you have slipped so far into a disinterested stupor that it's nearly impossible to believe this disc, this wretchedly boring disc, actually houses two A-grade songs. But at that point it won't really matter. Your only concern will be to see that it gets taken out of the CD player and to assure that it will not return there for a long, long time.

Standout(s): "Trains to Brazil," "Made-Up Lovesong #43"

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