:: Track Listing

1. Battle Brigades I
2. Battle Brigades II
3. Warning Raids over Kiev
4. Assembled Hazardly
5. Holding the Pilots/Holding the Facts
6. Broken Strings
7. Clones Were Made for Them But not for Us
8. Spain Never Made It
9. Buried Beneath the Winter Frames
10. Circuits on Boards


:: Record Review (No Big Hair)⊙ No Big Hair Home

Foundry Field Recordings

Prompts/Miscues (NBH)
(Emergency Umbrella; 2006)

Rating: 70%
Combined Rating: 73%


Read Clay’s entertaining Panic! at the Disco track review and now follow me here; there are exactly three acceptable kinds of emo: (1) SDRE, (2) Cap’n Jazz covering the Beverly Hills 90210 theme or “Take On Me,” and (3) post-emo. I consider Weezer power-pop, maybe that’s a fault of mine, but so be it. When I say “post-emo,” I’m not talking about the droogs behind “Sins Not Tragedies” or “Helena” or whatever the hell Jared Leto and his shitty band think they’re doing in that angstastic music video homage to Kubrick’s The Shining. When I say “post-emo,” I mean emo that’s said fuck it and moved on with its life.

I have no idea if the Foundry Field Recordings have genuine emo roots (who knows what I mean by “genuine emo roots,” anyways), but this is the kind of music that good post-emo bands make. Remember back when Appleseed Cast put out the Low Level Owl albums and you thought, “Wait, where’s my tortured screams, my distraught sax solos, my ridiculous drums?” You probably don’t remember thinking that, but anyways: screams got internalized, gonzo sax became U2 keys, drums went from ridiculous to plain old good. Which might seem like castration, but it allowed you to realize that the Cast were actually writing solid pop songs, now misted with post-rock atmosphere rather than drenched in hormonal turmoil. Prompts/Miscues is the same deal.

And yet different, though, because The Foundry Field Recording play it kind of Grandaddy with a sci-fi Album construct, a focus on strong melodies, and some familiar keyboard flourishes; meanwhile, they indulge a noisy edge (“Battle Brigades I” and “Circuits on Boards”), fulsome production and a fey vocal styling that’s a little, eh, Broken Social Scene or Stars or, you know, Canadian art-pop. Maybe their ambition’s a bit ahead of their experience and means; the sonic foolery is never as heady or immaculate as a YFIIP, the concept never as engaging or the melodies as memorable as a Sophtware Slump, but I’ll take this fine amalgam over Broken Social Scene and Sumday, knamean? Big bonus: no “Fambly Cat” in the album title.

If there’s a weak point, it’s the lyrics, which are occasionally good, mostly inoffensively solid, but I’d almost rather be offended for the sake of interest. The album’s concept deals somewhat literally with a THX 1138 dystopia, a desensitizing and isolating society; so it’s like a futuristic, less relevant version of what I think Wolf Parade tackled on their debut. Unlike Wolf Parade, the Foundry Field Recordings have very little fight in their music, but the catch is in hearing their melancholic resignation fashioned into such pretty, almost sunny pop songs. The sunlight’s filtered though some cold-ass clouds, though, and it’s falling on some dismal environs, no matter the cheer with which they’re explored. “Holding the Pilots/Holding the Facts” would make for a great single, all stomping Secret Machines drums, rubbery guitar chords, wonky keyboard solo and “woo-ooo-oooh” vocal hooks, but those hooks are embedding the lines, “And everything is on fire now / And everything is burning down / How can you explain this.” Then it ends with static and horns playing an uneven dirge. Nice contrast, right, but such conflicted emotional colors might prevent a fist pump.

“Broken Strings” more predictably matches its maudlin lyrics with acoustic guitar, strings and swooning BGVs, slacking too much on the “post” part of the silly genre descriptor that I’ve pegged these guys with. Still, songwriter Billy Schuh wisely avoids that sort of sap-play for the rest of the album, and he and his band quickly rebound with “Clones Were Made for Them But not for Us.” It begins a classic pop mixture of bells and jangly chords before unexpectedly/satisfyingly leading to a wailing axe climax where Schuh mutters, “And you know me as / file: h-b / Another wake / And I feel… so… alive…” That bleeds legato into “Spain Never Made It,” which is swell because it gives off a total How It Feels To Be Something On vibe with its timpani-like toms, dramatic chord progression and the soft falsetto sustain Schuh puts on his last syllable, the guitar warbling out of tune in tandem. There’s a little of that Sunny Day feel to the closer, too, which starts as an anthem and ends like a blitzkrieg, Billy on his sweetest behavior when he sings, “All those crates / All those graves.”

Becky Baxter’s bass lines sometimes cower a bit too much behind the cymbal splashes of Benjamin Hook, the context of the album story’s vague without really using that as a way to let the lyrics resonate more fully, and Schuh and Daniel Stegall could probably stand to bring the fret-fire more often to help counteract the thought, “Oh, this is a tad paisley.” But at least it’s not emo. Or at least it’s post-emo. Or at least it has nothing to do with emo. Or at least it’s good pop.

Chet Betz :: 2 June 2006 |