Larsen And Furious Jane Tourist With A Typewriter by: Justin Pearsall Mon:11-Jun-07 Label: Morningside Year: 2007 WB rating 50 out of 100

The statement ‘children are best seen and not heard’ has its origins in the idea that the underdevelopment of kids is pleasing on the eye, but not on the ear. When they do talk the pleasantness of little people is usually derived from their bright-eyed naivety and bravado – topic from Santa Claus to action figurines vividly coming to life with more over-the-top description than a NME review. But the constant prattle of fanciful ideas does become tiring, and after a while we grownups crave a little tangible conversation: causing us to zone out when listening, to turn the radio up in the car or to wack the shit out of the kid when they request a chocolate bar at the supermarket.

Let’s face it, essentially ‘children are best seen and not heard’ is a handbook for shit parenting. Kids simply cannot be blamed for sprouting the first thought that enters their brain. But bands can. And if I were Larson and Furious Jane’s dad I would be employing this principal strictly, and with all the cane-thumping authority that I could; pushing the band to concoct something interesting to say before opening their mouths again.

Tourist With A Typewriter is a mediocre album, its standing hurt by the underdevelopment of its songwriting and lyrical simplicity. It starts off promisingly, with ‘The Joy Of Smoking’ an Art of Fighting-esque, open mood piece. Here Torsten Larsen, the band’s songwriter and lead vocalist, get his tone perfectly right, conveying regret and sorrow in his meandering vocal line and pent-up frustration with the Summerteeth-like apocalyptic ending. But everyone knows that the flip side to the joy of smoking is the cancer and mechanical larynx that you get if you overindulge, and Larsen commits this sin, unsuccessfully trying to pass off a similar melody in the bridge to ‘Put Your Head On Parade’ and, to a lesser extent, ‘I Wish I Was A Mole In The Ground’.

Like how a child veers between topics, Tourist With A Typewriter bounces between a few different styles, sounding as if Larsen And Furious Jane are wandering blindly, with hands out searching for their sound. At best, these efforts employ the full gamut of their many members, building to giant-sized choruses and making sweeping dynamic changes, such as those on ‘It’s Your Universe’. Asides from the ambient side of the group’s sound, exemplified in ‘It’s Your Universe’ and ‘The Joy Of Smoking’, the band dabble in alt-country (‘Put The Head On Parade’) and rock (‘Unsuccessful Is The New Succesful’), both genres being adequately reproduced, but rarely displaying  the innovation and inspiration needed to define their sound.

If the songwriting is below average, it is the musicianship and arrangement skill that lifts the album to its precarious fence-sitting position. The bones of the songs are well covered and it is clear that Larsen And Furious Jane have laboured over the instrumentation and recording of the album – the highlight of this is undoubtedly the jazz-derived extended sax and piano solo in ‘It’s Your Universe’.

But misdirected lyricism and wayward song structures let the arranging and recording down. At times Torsten’s rhyme-and-rhyme again pattern is nothing short of horrendous and childlike in the worst of possible ways: “I thought somehow things were getting clearer/but when I look into the mirror/I see that I am getting older and not smarter”. Such predictability is frustrating and ruins any momentum the song had, this flow is shunted again by the rushed delivery of the “older and not smarter” section. If Torsten felt that he truly must ram as many syllables into a mere second of music, surely he could have found something more meaningful than this.

As a whole it is misjudged lyricism like this that really damages the excellent work the band has done on the musical side. Too often hard-earned sentiment is dragged through the mud via poor word choices and weak analogies which destroy the mood. The worst example of this being the aforementioned ‘It’s Your Universe’ with its comically misplaced sentiment: “I used to sweat like a pig there/Until someone turned off the heat” squashing the sparse piano arpeggios beneath it.

Mediocre is a particularly frustrating term for an artist, I’m sure. But for a listener, with so much music out there, mediocre just doesn’t cut it, and albums like Tourist With A Typewriter will simply get brushed away, neither seen nor heard.