When Kurt Cobain wore Scientists and Daniel Johnston t-shirts on MTV, he gave a charitable kick to the careers of his heroes. Likewise, Dylan probably sold some Guthrie albums when people realised why he was wearing that ridiculous little hat. There’s a reason that we find it interesting to learn what our favourite artists’ favourite artists are. While there are pitfalls in this curiosity, such as realising that your idol’s ‘great new sound’ is basically someone else’s from a decade before, basically we want a reference point and, as music lovers, a back story to the passions we receive from the passions of our most-loved musicians. Every band shudders when asked who their influences are, or worse, who they ‘sound like’. Still, efficiency of communication must reign. And, as a result, the tendency to name-checking does often get silly. Across MySpace profiles, one is able to chart a continuum of sincerity. At one end, a rather sizable amount of cynical types declare anything but who they sound like. In the middle, some Stoics simply state ‘all the usuals’. The Uglysuit are one of the bands that fall into the other end of the spectrum. They list Band of Horses, Death Cab for Cutie, The Flaming Lips, The Shins, The Decembrists and Coldplay in their ‘Boat Floaters’ application. If this intimates the middling path they are set to take across their debut self-titled album, look again, for, in their bio, they state their manifesto:
“artifice has replaced art, style trumps substance. Sincerity and honesty got lost along the way. Once in a while though, something breaks through”.
Are The Uglysuit hinting that they are the ordained ground-breakers into the realm of truth and beauty? If The Uglysuit is what the ‘possibility’ that ‘we haven’t become too jaded’ sounds like, I think I’ll go back to my den of cynicism. For that is what the band seem to imply with their ‘remarkably fresh-faced… heartfelt atmospheres of hope and love’: that there is no one else making true music, beautiful art. What a crock. As bombastic as it is beautiful, as turgid as it is truthful, their invocations to glory predict brilliance, but fall very short. There are a lot of bands doing the wide-eyed psychedelic indiepop thing, and a lot of them a lot better than The Uglystick do. Perhaps it’s bad form to have a go at a band for their MySpaceisms, but when something is so overwhelmingly mediocre as
The Uglysuit is, it seems too good a snipe to resist.
The most fatal thing about
The Uglysuit is its distinct lack of character. At a recent WB podcast, Ed Butler said that this record would be perfect background music for a summer’s-afternoon-sit-around-with- beers. If that were to be its only function, then fine. But no musician creates their art with so narrowly utilitarian a purpose in mind. The Uglysuit aesthetic sits somewhere between poppy and yet expansive post-folk-rock and more lyrical moments, neither done with much panache. When they do wordy folk, it sounds like Bright Eyes. On lead-single in waiting ‘Chicago’, lead vocalist Israel Hindman intones: “I tried to sleep, in the rain, underneath an acorn tree, but the drops kept falling hitting me”. After the meandering Sigur Ros-lite of opener ‘Brownblue’s Passing’, ‘Chicago’ seems a statement of intent, but we lose track of the lyrics and the lush arrangement peppered with Wurlitzers, accordions and piano seems more big-budget studio adornment than real necessity.
Much of the record passes in such a manner. While the pace and placement is sporadically mixed up, the alternation between ineffectual lyrical mumblings and extended instruments wash over in what is essentially very boring, and worse, safely boring, music. Certain tracks have more genius to their construction than others. The mid-section and outro breakdown of ‘Everyone Now Has a Smile’ is particularly lovely, a rare moment of transcendental beauty on an album that strives for this albeit more consistently. Final cut ‘Let It Be Known’, with its gently melodic tangled guitar and piano lines, likewise builds momentum steadily and is all the more successful for it. Overall, however, these moments are few and far between. It’s not that
The Uglysuit is a bad record by any yardstick, but it is a truly unremarkable one. And for music that hints at the epic, grand and atmospheric- mediocre is a fairly bad thing to be.
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