Categories : Music Reviews, Rock + Pop.
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Rating: 4 / 5 Reviewer: Kevin Hartford |
The opening track to Skeletons’ People, ‘Lil Rich,’ is a chorus-free spoken-sung narrative about guns and cops that sounds simultaneously like a guitar-accompanied poetry slam and an aggressive full-band jam session. If you mated the Slint album Spiderland with the Modest Mouse song ‘The Stars Are Projectors,’ People would be the result. It’s math-y folk rock in which the guitars and drums are occasionally dismissed in favour of pianos, woodwind instruments, hand claps and cheering kids (the frenetic ‘More Than One Thing’) or less decipherable elements, like whatever the sound effect is in the background of ‘Walmart and the Ghost of Jimmy Damour.’
The lyrics don’t always make sense and sometimes the band should quit while they’re ahead – ‘Grandma’ is about three minutes too long, and probably not in the best position as the album’s second track – but People showcases a push and pull between pop-convention adherence and genre-defying asymmetry that’s fascinating to listen to. ‘No’ has actual verses and choruses, which is notable considering it is preceded by a track that ends with frontman Matthew Mehlan chanting “Are they walking on more than the floor?” for 45 seconds. The nearly nine-minute long ‘Barack Obama Blues’ starts out with a Fleet Foxes-like refrain of “Oh no, here we go again” and then deteriorates into a cacophonous guitar solo before finishing as an ambient piece.
The album ends with the musical equivalent of a hug, the title track ‘People,’ in which Mehlan assures the listener that they’ll always be buds. There isn’t much more to the song aside from the vocals, but they’re lovely, as is the minimal, woodwind instrument-filled backing track. People is kind of like a painting you can’t make heads or tails out of but really enjoy anyway: it’s puzzling, charming and off-putting in equal measure, and the sort of thing that’ll take a while to fully appreciate. All in all, good work.
