If you wait long enough, everything eventually comes back into fashion. I was born too late for the heyday of prog rock (though I did manage to wear out two copies of Jethro Tull's Thick as a Brick before I finally got some sense). Never fear, here it comes again: Radiohead, The Flaming Lips, Mercury Rev, The Delgados... It seems that every day, a new band decides to take on an Arkestra of disparate instruments and fashion them into an unexpected wall of sound (see any album Dave Fridmann has ever produced). Thankfully, these bands seem to have kept only the most interesting aspects of progginess, without sounding like Yes in any way, shape or form.
"Paranoid Android" is not "Roundabout".
Naturally, we're not always going to get a Soft Bulletin or a Deserter's Songs out of this new complexity; the question is, does this kind of production leave room for the "good" album, or are they all doomed to be "brilliant" or "awful"? Euphemystic nicely answers that question. This is a modern, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink album that bravely stakes out the "well-above-average" territory.
The basis of the band's sound seems to be the singer-songwriter ideal. You often catch snippets of James Taylorish confessionals and Simon and Garfunkel harmonies as the disc progresses. The twist is that these guys are primarily interested in confounding your expectations for that sound.
Not only the tempo and volume, but the tone and instrumentation of many of these songs reverses on a dime. It's often exhilarating, as on the opener, "An Instant Death", which veers effortlessly from acoustic strum to spacey swoops to Neutral Milk Hotel chorus. When the tactic is less successful, you occasionally get the feeling that they stretched a three-minute idea into a five-minute song just to jam in a few more musical switchbacks.
The band's press material quotes reviewers who make frequent use of "honest" and "childlike" in reviewing singer Joe Knapp's lyrics, and I might as well jump on the bandwagon. Joe Knapp writes honest, childlike lyrics; please that neither of these adjectives is a value judgment. "Honest" can be good, but it can also serve as an excuse for a dearth of original symbolism or an absence of wit. "Childlike" can be fresh-faced and innocent, but it can also be precious and self-obsessed. The obvious single, "An Instant Birth", which is a great song, also points out how closely Knapp flirts with pretension, coming as it does immediately after "An Instant Death". To be fair, the pretension level is generally manageable at worst, but "Like a Friend", which begins "I remember how we used to talk/like swallows in an unborn child's throat", kind of makes you want to punch him, doesn't it?
Finally, the whole album boils down to the fact that in the middle of "I Promise You'll Never Grow Old", the whole band breaks into an homage to the Sesame Street theme song: childlike and honest, indeed. If you don't enjoy this moment, you have no soul.
