Shapes And Sizes Split Lips, Winning Hips, A Shiner by: Steve Scully Wed:11-Apr-07 Label: Year: 2007 WB rating 39 out of 100

I feel like I’ve just left a University English tutorial. For those of you who have had the pleasure of experiencing one of these enlightened gatherings, you’ll understand me when I say this: Shapes & Sizes reminds me of the mature-age student who turns up only occasionally, but when he/she decides to grace everyone with their presence, they spout the most amazingly nonsensical, abstract, pretentious bullshit you’ve ever heard. Even the tutor is left dumbfounded. And when this student realises the tutor’s lack of understanding, all he/she does is sit there, head nodding, mouth turned up into a smug grin, thinking: “I am, without a doubt, the greatest mind these people have encountered.” Little does he/she know that they are, in fact, just the product of poorly misdirected compliments, mixed with an already-inflated ego. You sit there, wish misfortune upon this person, and you bitch about them to the person next to you. You, reader, are the person next to me.

Shapes & Sizes’ first and most lasting statement is the opening track, ‘Alone/Alive’. Immediately shocking; it’s a hectic trip. Caila Thompson-Hannant’s vocals initially don’t seem to fit with the heavily strummed guitars, barring when she echoes the guitar’s whines in the down-beat chorus. The band’s mission statement is plain faced, there’s no depth to the musical vision shared by these four decidedly odd characters, other than a collective aim to attempt the unexpected, and enjoy themselves. This opening track, with its awkward, yet appealing and memorable vocal melody, moves seamlessly into the album’s second tune, ‘Head Movin’’, which is perhaps as straight-forward as Shapes & Sizes gets. The pounding rhythms and strong guitar presence lend themselves to an apparent structure, something the album, as a whole, lacks.

More so than its lack of structure, the album’s most resonating weakness is Caila Thompson-Hannant’s vocals. Her childish tone and annoying rants belie her undeniable vocal range and ability. In ‘Geese’ she shows off this admirable ability, but also displays an inability to add any palatable melodic element to a song. It’s at times reminiscent of the pretentious scatting of George’s Katie Noonan; I get the idea that there’s definitely some degree of self-assuredness at work here, and I am left confused as to the purpose of much of the meandering, tuneless spiels. Many amazing moments of utter logorrhoeic nonsense pervade the record, none more strikingly irritating that Thompson-Hannant’s droning of the words: “the horse’s mouthy mouth” in the track entitled, ‘The Horse’s Mouthy Mouth.’

‘The Taste In My Mouth’ offers both Thompson-Hannant’s most palatable vocal line, and a concoction of horns, guitar and banjo that proves to be the album’s sonic summit. Undoubtedly very pretty as a whole, the song is let down by the sense that not much here has been crafted, or too well-rehearsed. Little guitar lines, atmospheric rather than substantive, work their way into the song as it grows, offering little other than a way of placating the otherwise idle guitarist, whose presence in this song seems otherwise perfunctory.
For all their self-perceived progressiveness and apparent ambition, all Shapes & Sizes have managed to do is create a record that comes across as both a hastily-mustered-up collection of songs – perhaps to satisfy label demand – and an amateurish attempt to defy conventional genre stereotypes. Most songs seem to either be segments of possible creations (the 44 second track, ‘Grassy Corner, A Sunset’ is one of these), or over-long pieces of self-indulgence and songwriting waywardness that, rather than showing off the band’s skill, only serve to reinforce a vision of a group of attention-deficient, self-important, addle-brained misfits. There’s little to recommend about Split Lips, Winning Hips, A Shiner other than the opening two tracks, which when viewed in the context of the record as a whole, seem like paradigms of songwriting perfection.

So go ahead, Shapes & Sizes, take your crap essay back to the tutor for re-marking. I’m sure you think you’ve got the right to a far better score, but I urge you to just accept your lot, realise your flaws, and to work on them before you put together your next offering. It was barely a year between the band’s first album, Shapes and Sizes, and the release of this effort, and the lack of time commitment definitely shows. For a band with such ambition, perhaps a more systematic, meticulous approach would have served them better. For now, though, I can only judge on what I have before me, and this is not good at all.