Album Challenge #1: Donerail

My old friend Josh, also on board with the "force oneself to encounter new music" theme of this site's music, proposed a good idea wherein he and I would, on an occasional basis, suggest "new" albums (to that person) to each other for reviewing. This is a good idea, because in some ways we're very divergent in our interests (he put it well in his post, so I'll just direct you to that), yet in others we share similiar roots
(our friendship was built on three main pillars: 1. his contempt for me arising from how I acted in freshman year english class to try and attract the attention of the girl sitting in front of him (funny story, he and his father managed to accidentally ruin my first and only "date" with this girl), 2. debate, him because his brother was the coach and me because I was a fucking nerd, and 3. our love for guitar playing and the classic rock greats).

In any case, my first "challenge" him was Four Tet's Rounds, which I think is a pretty good choice as far as trying to pick a more or less purely electronica album that a non-electronica fan will almost definately enjoy. And his first to me is to listen to Donerail's first album "Disconnected." This is a band he's connected to - but not strongly enough that I would feel the need to not be a dick about what I think.

I'm awful at describing music, so I'll let the band speak for itself here:
"Bouncy Americana-roots music featuring introspective story telling and big guitars."

Well, I'm clearly not the intended audience for this music, since that description only bats .500 for me - not its fault, but I'm not going to be drawn naturally to Americana-roots or to introspective story telling (as I've said before, I suffer from an almost utter inability to follow the story-threads in music unless I basically look up the written lyrics). Bouncy and big guitars, however, are big thumbs up from me (what would a band with just those two elements look like? Tapes 'n Tapes, maybe - another portland band! Of course, T'nT might well have story elements that I've never noticed). I'll try and be thorough to accomodate the "challenge to new things" format, but since my review skills are bad you're probably better off just listening to clips from the songs for yourself -
http://cdbaby.com/cd/donerail



It starts off with a song that is pretty tight on instrumentals but suffers from lack-luster vocals (this last part is characteristic of much of the album. The strange effect of the beginning of each verse flailing about, only for it to sync up tonally on the way down. If you just listened to the last half of each vocal line, you'd be in pretty good shape. This is particularly evident on #04 "Portland.") "Long Division Exit" is one of the best tracks instrumentally, though, because the experimentation and guitar diversity that Donerail likes is dispersed throughout the song, not just bunched up at the end (which is the problem with the second song, "Drenched." That and the fact that the blues solo doesn't really mesh well with the style of the song whatsoever.)

"No Caroline" is my favorite track - the vocals aren't hidden behind anything, the song knows when to be soft, when to be loud, when to experiment, and is just well balanced over all. The best thing it has going for it is how the staccato lyrics lay on top of the laid-back accompanying main guitar melody .

"Portland," again, scores high in the guitar experimentation category (although there's a little too much lead guitar diddles in a few spots), is ok with everything else. The line "Portland I miss you....we rely on each other/Like a sister and a brother/Or - a drunk and his lover" - who is the drunk and who is the lover? I'm not totally certain. "Gale" is kind of forgettable. And not really very much like a gale, unless a gale sounds like one constant, lazy, ambulatory guitar solo.
"Vicodin Dreams" should be named "Expensive effects pedal purchase justification song". I love a lot of the things being attempted in here; it just needs a complete rebuilding. Like a castle made out of a bunch of awesome LEGO pieces that are all kind of jumbled together.

"Circle" resets to the early-album-energy kind of song. Fast, short, enjoayble ditty. "Unwind"'s decent, but kind of muted overall. The last part of the album features songs that grab your attention for being fairly different from the preceding stuff - "Violet" has some sweet moments, "My Son is Sane" is typical fare but plays with silence to achieve some good energy. "You", on the other hand, is pretty flat energy wise. And as for "Bozeman - Radio version" - they mean like a 1920s radio. The silent-movie-soundtrack recording technique is interesting, and makes for some cool guitar sounds, but you're still left kind of wondering why it is happening.

So, the album knows how to explode and innovate on micro levels - just not at a macro level, and not consistently. That, plus the big vocal inconsistencies, is what holds it back from successfully blending Wilco-esque stuff with other alternative sources (that I'm not musically literate enough to identify, but are clearly there).