LOW LOW LOW LA LA LA LOVE LOVE LOVE – Feels, Feathers, Bog, and Bees
Yes, you are reading that right. Before I even talk about the music I have to address the elephant in the room that is the band’s name. There are plenty of otherwise good bands with asinine names. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and Saturday Looks Good To Me could both have probably come up with something better — or at least shorter. But you forget about the pretense when you don’t really hear that sort of self-pleasuring bullshit in their music. In other words, “Clap Your Hands,” as a band name, is totally forgive-and-forgettable after you’ve grown familiar with their fun tunes, which contain the tiniest hint of weight. Okay, so I am clapping my hands with enough emotional reaction to the content to also say “yeah!” It’s still an unnecessarily long and absurd name, but you forget all about it.
Low Low Low La La La Love Love Love unfortunately have an insanely busy production to match their repetitive (and ultimately meaningless) name. This release is all over the place. I listened to it several times before I could even form an opinion.
First strike against them is the vocal harmonizing. The only band I know of that has ever pulled off doing it on pretty much every track of an album is The Beach Boys. Here, though, it just sounds like way too much Art Garfunkel, and on a Paul Simon solo project, no less. Every note of almost every song is stretched out like taffy to let the voices intermix more than seems possible. At first it’s interesting, but on repeated listens it’s closer to operatic whining. The staggered cadence of the harmonized vocals really dilutes the music backing it, too — which is the biggest shame because the band uses a lot of ingenious little elements throughout.
The echoing piano of the sixth track, “Piano,” or the pleasing distortion and plucking banjo on the seventh track, “Friend Of Mine,” are all but lost in the cluttered mess of the tracks that surround them. It’s just too much.
Feels, Feathers, Bog, and Bees as an album is like a fruit salad with every single fruit in the known universe in it, but only one bite of each. Sometimes you get an Iron & Wine vibe, sometimes more Brian Wilson, sometimes a sliver of recent top 40 pop. The problem, though, is that’s one tune ushering you in and out of all that space.
The band is good, and could seriously develop into a great act. Right now, though, I think they’re not sure what exactly they’re trying to accomplish with their studio time.
(Other Electricities, PO Box 352, Portland, OR 97207)
