The Slip Eisenhower by: Joseph Coscarelli Mon:23-Jul-07 Label: Bar/None Year: 2006 WB rating 37 out of 100

The prospect of a make-over leaves one anxious and excited about the reinvention looming and for better or worse, shows a healthy dose of proactive revision. Results may vary, hopefully toward progression and growth, less successfully resembling regression or more ambiguously in the form of a lateral jump. Intent must also be taken into account, especially in regards to bandwagon hopping; although Linkin Park's emo make-over did result in a platinum record, in terms of forging new ground, there's something still to be desired. In the case of the Boston, Massachusetts trio The Slip, Eisenhower represents a largely lateral maneuver from Phish-style progressive jamming toward a more easily digestible form of indie-rock. And while the aim is obvious and the prog-rock exploration is trimmed of its fatty excess, the album's cohesion is thrown askew by an unbalanced and unexciting jumble of poor poetry and an interminable lack of commitment to stylistic flow.       

The album takes up the band's newfound mission from the first chords of opener 'Children Of December', busting out a neat and amicable take on Built To Spill's legacy but bordering on kitschy with lines like "But save one for the empirical boy with his empirical toys/The Hots Wheels, the Autobots and the Decepticons," with the pop-culture name-drops coming off a bit forced after a line that means little to nothing, empirically or otherwise. Regrettably, nonsensical lyrics are commonplace for The Slip, who might've benefited from a little less virtuosity on the six-string and a little practice with the prose. At their most insufferable, lines like "People are strange, that’s why we're strangers/Words go in, they don't come out/The forest is big, that's why we need rangers," on 'Suffocation Keep' make Interpol's Paul Banks look like Walt Whitman, especially when pitted against the song's fragile string and acoustic guitar arrangement.  

First single 'Even Rats' sounds promising out of the gate as its main riff starts bobbing along doused in fuzz with well placed harmonics; the band might even sound like Guided By Voices on Bee Thousand (almost) through the filter of FM-radio, polished and refined. A shiny replica of a deliberately scuffed classic might be endearing, not to mention marketable, if The Slip didn't take to aimless meandering so scatterbrained that it hurts to imagine the wandering this band can manage over an album's worth of material – the song representing an unfortunate microcosm of the album's ultimate pitfall. The direct "rawk" of the song's chorus adopts a crunchy stop-and-go progression and "whoa-oh" melody that rests a bit too close to Collective Soul's '90s smash ‘Shine’, an antithesis of the song's humble beginning, shattering any hopes of subtle guitar-based indie pop. A two-minute prog-based outro follows, as a soaring wordless melody and matching guitar lead digress into an open-ended jam ripe for a masturbatory live show finale.  

Other tangents include a stab at the UK on songs like 'If One Of Us Should Fall' adopting the sentimentality of Coldplay or Travis and completely shaking the jam band baggage on a delicate, succinct number brimming with beauty. But the reprieve is all too brief as the band fires into a 7-minute epic, 'Airplane/Primitive’, which lacks the peak that would make such a song feel anything but bloated. 'First Panda In Space' boasts squeaky sounds and noodling as a mid-album interlude but its biggest perk is that it clocks in at under two-and-a-half minutes and leads right into the psychedelic swirl of 'The Soft Machine' taking cues from the jazz fusion/prog-rock band and the equally experimental William S. Burroughs novel of the same name. But even under the guise of psych-pop Eisenhower feels aimless, never more so than on the album's second saga, the eight-minute album closer 'Paper Birds'. For all the space sounds in the song, and throughout the album, it's awe-inspiring to come to the realization that The Slip never quite get off the ground, their scope perhaps too galactic, resulting in nothing but a prolonged failure to launch.