Song, by Toad

I’ve been humming and hawing about actually penning this review for some time and the reason is basically this: I thought the single Where My Fortune Lies was a stunning piece of work – beautiful artwork and, most importantly of course, a truly great song.  Midnight Folly, on the other hand, I am finding a less than arresting album, and I thought it would be a bit mean to laud the band in one post, and then insult them in the next.  Still, that’s the nature of reviews I guess, and as a certain Mr. Brown has recently discovered, you can never entirely escape your honest personal opinions of a record, no matter how much you might have wanted to like it to begin with.

Actually, despite my whingeing, Midnight Folly starts very well, with the thumping Long Ago a stirring addition to the very noble tradition of Western-tinged murder ballad with its narrative roots in uncompromisingly merciless storylines of frontier legend, which are themselves coloured by murderous tales common in old folk music.  It’s the kind of song which would sit very well in the generally territory mapped out loosely by the likes of Smog, Calexico,  the Willard Grant Conspiracy and Richmond Fontaine.

This is also pretty much the territory inhabited by the rest of the album in terms of musical style.  Slide guitar, baritone delivery, harmonica, and a little bit of brass backing make this album pretty firmly ‘of a type’ with a great deal of other music released in the last five to ten years.  For the most part this is hardly a problem of course, because it’s a style I absolutely love, so provided the songwriting delivers it with some elan then this isn’t an issue.  What I struggle with, unfortunately, is that for the most part the melodies of the album don’t grab my attention, no matter how many dozens of times I have now listened to this record.

Bob Dylan often doesn’t really deal in ‘choruses’, so to speak, but he has a rolling musical signature in his delivery most of the time, even when singing long, verbose, narrative songs.  Long Ago barely has a chorus, but it too is punctuated by a repeated musical signature.  When Smog were at their most hushed and plain, say in the likes of A River Ain’t Too Much to Love, there may not have been much obvious structure to the songs but there was a always a rolling, repeated refrain, even when its cycle was unusually long for a pop song.

What there seems to be lacking in these songs, for all their excellent style and lyrical strength, is something as seemingly superficial as a hook.  So far, and this is of course an entirely subjective thing, I have failed to find anything in most of these tracks to stick in my head; the music often seems to lack a distinctively individual personality from one track to the next.  I often find myself wondering if I was listening to the crescendo of the previous song, or if this was a new one with a bit more guitar.  Consequently, even after dozens of listens, large parts of the middle of this album simply failed to separate themselves out to me, and I still couldn’t identify the specific song I was listening to a lot of the time.

The genius of things like Where My Fortune Lies is that as well as everything else, it works as a joyous pop song, pure and simple.  For me, a lot of this album does not actually achieve that, rendering all the other good things about it somewhat redundant.  I find myself loving songs like Long Ago, My First Soul, Where My Fortune… and to an extent Four Rivers and that is just about it, sadly, because I really wanted to love this album.

Auld Lang Syne – Where My Fortune Lies

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Auld Lang Syne – My First Soul

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

MySpace | More mp3s | Buy the album from Viper Bite Records