Do You Hate Excitement? Listen to Doves!

As you might’ve guessed, that’s not the cover of Doves’ Kingdom of Rust album. I’m listening to it right now, so if I nod off a bit here and there, then

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Sorry. Where was I? Oh yeah. Kingdom of Rust. I fell asleep during the first track. Then I woke up. “Jetstream” just ended. “Kingdom of Rust” is starting. Nodding off again. 11 minutes of my life on the first two tracks of Kingdom of Rust. I feel like I’m at the DMV. Seriously, this album should come with a warning label: “High grade musical narcotic – do not operate heavy machinery while listening.”

Lest I be accused of cranking out overwrought prose (which seems to happen around here – the accusation, not the prose itself. You’ve never seen me in full overwrought mode, for I can assure you that if you did, it would put Byron Orpheus to shame. And if you don’t know who he is, stop reading this and go watch some Venture Brothers right now), the new Doves album isn’t terrible. It’s kinda like a Coldplay album – their singers even sound alike – so maybe your girlfriend will like it. I’m thinking of doing a Folgers Crystals-style switch on my fiance where I tell her I’m putting on a Coldplay album and I play Kingdom of Rust instead.

Every song on Kingdom of Rust seems like it’s an hour long, and it seems like they want me to feel like there are epic runs up to even more epic climaxes, but if Kingdom of Rust were a state, it’d be Kansas. Not only ’cause it’s flat, but because it doesn’t seem to believe in evolution. The guitars are out of Coldplay (whose guitars are out of U2) and the vocals that aren’t Chris Martiny (and they are few) sound like the guy from Muse who sounds like Thom Yorke. The Doves’ guy (Jimi Goodwin? Jez Williams? I don’t care) doesn’t do that annoying falsetto thing that Martin does, but neither does he write melodies that are as strong as Coldplay’s. Take note, readers – I’ll never say something this nice about Coldplay again. And it could only take something as frightfully dull as Kingdom of Rust to get me to say it.

But here’s the thing: Coldplay, for all their faults (and they are many) can at least cough up a melodic hook – they’re usually obvious and about as trite as music can get this side of Andrew Lloyd Weber, but they’re there. And I’ll even cop to liking “The Scientist.” Chris Martin is a bad lyricist who writes obvious melodies that your girlfriend will love. If you’re musically inclined, you probably won’t love them. But with Doves, there’s nothing to grab onto. This is not to say that bands should only write obvious melodies – I love Tom Waits and Sonic Youth, so obvious melody is clearly not a must for me – but some melody, something to pull you into the song would be good. It’s as if Doves have forgotten that other people will listen to their music and …

Hang on. A knock at the door.

Later, 9:15 a.m., Thursday, April 30th, 2009: You will not fucking believe what just happened. I started writing this review at about 8:30 this morning and around 8:45, I got a knock on the door. From ninjas. Or zombies. Or Pirates. Or some combination of the three. There were hundreds of them, stumbling around the courtyard of my apartment complex, lamely hurling throwing stars, growling “arrrrrr” and eating my neighbors’ brains.

Fortunately, I’ve been playing a lot of Dead Rising lately and was fully prepared. I grabbed up my baseball bat and went to town, obliterating head after head, enjoying the splatty, rotten-pumpkiny squish of their skulls caving in at the hard smack of my Louisville Slugger. Some of the more ninja-ish zombies attempted to engage me in hand to hand combat, but were easily dispatched with a kitchen knife (no plot hole here, readers – I tucked the knife into my belt when I grabbed my baseball bat. You can’t be too careful when pirate-ninja-zombies invade your tiny apartment complex). Lucky for me, even ninja zombies are kinda slow moving, and definitely not as stealthy as real ninjas. The pirate zombies lunged forward, clumsily brandishing their swords. My faithful dog, Asha, came to my aid here, biting the legs of the poor zombie bastards. As they toppled upon each other, my trusty bat and I made mush of their heads. And now I had swords. Seeing that more zombies remained, I picked up two swords, letting my bat rest. I struck a heroic pose indeed, in jeans, sandals, and a Hold Steady t-shirt. I held the swords at the ready, looked a zombie square in its dead-ass eyes, and finally had an excuse to say, “Come get some.”

The rest is really a blur. I remember putrefied flesh advancing upon me and the flash of blades cutting through dead skin and hollow bone. When it was all over, I waded through the pile of zombie parts and zombie guts, back into my apartment to complete my duty to you, my readers, and finish reviewing and – shudder – listening to Doves’ Kingdom of Rust album.

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Sorry. Nodded off there again. I think “Compulsion” is playing. Can’t tell. Too bored. I know what you’re thinking, too: you’re thinking there is no way that pirate-ninja zombie thing happened. You can think what you want; I report, you decide. But you gotta admit that reading about pirate-ninja-zombies is a helluva lot more exciting than reading about the new Doves album or, dog forbid, listening to the fucking thing.

The Extremely Long Soundtrack of Our Lives

The potential pitfalls of the double-album are well enumerated throughout music history. Sometimes you get The Wall or, if you’re very lucky, London Calling. Other times, you get the last Beyonce album or – dog help you – Stadium Arcadium.  So it’s treacherous territory, even for bands as talented as The Clash (I know some of you are thinking that Sandanista was their big stinker double album, but you’re wrong – it’s their big stinker triple album; with the help of Winamp or a similar player, you can whittle it down to the length of London Calling and make it a pretty good listen).

“So,” you might be thinking, “why the hell would a pleasantly mediocre band like The Soundtrack of Our Lives want to foist 90 minutes of music on us in this here 21st century? Haven’t they heard I Am Sasha Fierce?”

Those are good questions, dear reader. From the reviews I’ve read of TSOOL’s Communion, the double-album in question, I start to get the feeling that the reviewers, daunted by the sheer size of the task, have scanned the tracks once or twice before muttering a tired “Yeah, it’s pretty good,” and scampering off to digest some eight-song indie EP or to circle jerk about Wavves some more.

But not I. I’m the crazy fuck who actually listened, track by track, to Chris Cornell’s Scream album. If I could do that, I can certainly wade into the deep waters of Communion. And I did. And they’re not, as I suspected, that deep.

The central question here is, “Can an album suck even if none of the songs really suck?” Of course it can. This leads us to Chorpenning’s Theory of Tolerable Mediocrity. I submit to you, dear reader(s?),  that a certain amount of mediocrity is tolerable in music (it’s never “good” because that would make it something other than mediocre). That is, there is truly good music (Neko Case) and there is truly terrible music (My Chemical Romance) and in between, there are myriad degrees of quality and unquality. For example, if Oasis or Coldplay come on the radio, I don’t get pissed about it. Those are two distinctly mediocre bands, not good enough for my praise, not bad enough for my scorn. (Chris Martin is, however, worth singling out because he’s such a fucking goon) Don’t care what they’re all about. On the other hand, if My Chemical Romance comes on the radio, I fly into a rage. This is because My Chemical Romance is one of the worst bands ever; they make the listener a worse person for having heard them. If I could fight the entire band, I would. Seriously, fuck My Chemical Romance. Where was I? Oh yeah – the point is, there’s mediocre stuff that I don’t much care about and then there’s all the other stuff.

You might’ve guessed by now that I think The  Soundtrack of Our Lives is a mediocre band. You’re partly right: sometimes, they creep up into “Pleasant Enough” or even “Pretty Okay.” But that doesn’t excuse the bloated mess that is Communion. Part of what makes something mediocre tolerable is brevity.

TSOOL is at their most Oasisy on the album opener “Babel On,” which even features shouts of “Come on!” on the chorus, a trope that Oasis is contractually obligated to use at least once per album. Oh, and “Babel On” is nearly six and a half minutes long. So they start out their bloated mess of an album with a bloated mess of a song, but it lets you know what you’re in for. If you’re rocking out to “Babel On”, you’ll probably enjoy the rest of Communion. But, as I did on the Obits record, I found myself checking my watch half way through the first disc – and I don’t own a watch.

There’s a sense that TSOOL is trying to go for something Big and Meaningful on Communion, but there’s not really anything in the lyrics that articulates it. It strikes me more that they had 24 songs and didn’t feel like cutting any of them out. As I alluded to earlier, none of the songs on Communion are terrible, but none of them really reach out and grab you either. The first track I even nodded my head to was “Flipside,” the Kinks-aping song three tunes deep on the second disc.  That’s the song that climbs up to “Pleasant Enough” but it’s the 15th of 24 songs, and that’s too long to wait for something I can get on the first song of Vetiver’s Tight Knit. Oh, and all the songs that follow that first song.

All in all, Communion is bloated ogre of a mediocre record (it’s mediogre, which would be a pretty awesome name for a band) from a band that did much better for itself on its 2005 release Origin, Vol 1. If you’re a diehard Soundtrack of Our Lives fan, I guess you’ll be fine with Communion, but you know what I’ve never seen? A diehard Soundtrack of our Lives fan.