Another day and yet another Arcade Fire aping, instrument shop plundering, baroque pop album. However, Fleet Foxes have kind of ruined it for everyone by setting the bar so high. So, for the likes of Sea Wolf, Bodies Of Water and a whole plethora of bland imitations, it’s become more of a race for second place rather than the top spot.
And so it is with a heavy heart I slip Oakland’s Port O’Brien release ‘All We Could Do Was Sing’ into the CD player, but wait what’s this? Primal Scream’s ‘Rocks’? Maybe it’s going to be a stomper, maybe I was wrong to just tar it with the same brush as all the rest, maybe this will give me palpitations, maybe…..oh no, there it is, the all too familiar group chanting / singing that countless stateside bands are employing at present. Some do it with style and finesse whilst others (like Port O’Brien) sound like a bunch of drunken friends who thought it was a good idea at the time.
There are moments of beauty on this album; ‘Don’t Take My Advice’ brazenly flaunts its country influence with the guitar, vocal and barely discernable banjo following the same melody. The banjo and strings add a warm glow to a track that covers the cold subject matter of indecisive love: “My legs are telling me to run, but my heart tells me that you’re the one” “I’m not ready to settle down, God damn I’ve just started looking round“. ‘Stuck On A Boat’ is a sparse number using strings again, not to achieve warmth but a stark melancholy, emboldened ever more by the sugary sweet female harmonies.
As well as these sorrowful ballads, the album also succeeds when it lets it’s hair down and gives the songs a bit of pig. ‘Pigeonhold’ veers from the script with some discordance, a bit of distortion and a Neil Young style guitar wig out at the end. Likewise, ‘Close The Lid’ welcomes in a jaunty pop sensibility that reduces the band to the basics of guitar, bass and drums. And maybe that’s where it succeeds; where once that combination had become tired and over used, it is now an oasis in a desert of string laden, oboe parping, banjo plucking, baroque pop.
With the exception of these standout tracks most of the songs on ‘All We Could Do Was Sing’ could actually be used as the dictionary definition of ‘album filler’. ‘The Rooftop Song’ and ‘In Vino Veritas’ both take two chords and plod along like a determined elephant going in a circle. Both seeming to be barely formed ideas thrown in to pad the album out. Others seem to employ the ‘Noel Gallagher school of lyrics’ technique: “My eyes will not shut and my legs will not strut” (‘My Eyes Won’t Shut’) and the vomit inducing ‘Valdez’: “Exon, Exon clean it up, take all of your money and put it in my cup, there’s nothing you could do to repay the sea, but there’s about 2 million ways that you could repay me“. What did they do, get their pre-school siblings to write the fucking lyrics? Scrub that, they obviously misjudged the amount of monkeys they needed locked up in a room. Whatever, it’s an awful finale to what is at best a mediocre album.
If Fleet Foxes and Arcade Fire float your boat, then it’s perfectly reasonable to expect this to get you tapping your fingers and nodding your head, but essentially it’s just another act, over mining an already depleted source where new and original ideas are as easy to find as the last Dodo.
Top Tracks: ‘Don’t Take My Advice’, ‘Pigeonhold’.
Released 04/08/2008 on City Slang
