The Brave Little Abacus, and their latest release - Masked Dancers: Concern in So Many Things You Forget Where You Are - strikes me in exactly the same way as that game did. It’s something that I can’t see appealing to everyone, if for no other reason than because it sounds like it was written specifically for me. It’s rough production value and abrasive vocal style is analogous to the quirky visuals of Earthbound, and similarly may scare off the broader audience they so thoroughly deserve. But that doesn’t matter much to me, because I know the few people that are lucky enough to let it into their heads will find a classic they can return to dozens of times over for years to come.
It’s difficult to describe the band accurately to the uninitiated, but the closest I can come is to call them a fusion of Cap’n Jazz and Yes. There are a ton of other influences scattered throughout, taking cues in parts from bands as seemingly incompatible as The Dillinger Escape plan to the Who, and it’s easy to draw close parallels to other modern emo classics like On the Might of Princes, Algernon Cadwallader, and Colossal. As a whole, however, this three-member band (with a revolving door of horn players) manages to carve out their own unique brand from the source material, and make it work with a grace and intelligence that bellies their young age and relative inexperience. The atmosphere the band captures is the perfect balance of youthful exuberance and the sullen bittersweet of growing up, and takes the listener on a fifty-minute staycation to an awesome country I like to call Rockandrolliopolis.
The structure of the album strikes me almost as a concept album; the songs lace and curl around each other, making it sound more like one long composition with three or four movements. Repeating themes pop up in lyrics, and there is a ton of bleed from one track to the next. One of the things about the BLA’s earlier releases is that the songs never felt like they were unified. It gave them a great variety, but neither of the previous releases were anything more than a collection of singles. On Masked Dancers, the band tells a very cohesive story with the songs they lay out, and broadens the scope of their songwriting greatly. Whereas in the past, the songs seemed very cluttered collections of great ideas, these songs have a lot of breathing room; long intros, quiet interludes, and open spaces. This makes the dynamics of this CD pretty stunning, with some pretty brilliant use of tension and release song structures in the vein of Braid or the aforementioned On the Might of Princes. Another thing the BLA does really well on this release is the way they play with time signatures and riff structure. They can make an 11/4 sound like radio rock, and 4/4 sound like it was written on another planet. The musicianship is top-notch, bursting with technical feats, without the antiseptic, robotic baggage that so often comes with fancy playing. It’s a feat not many bands manage to pull off; the energy and fun of a sloppy punk band with the fast and accurate hands of metal or prog-rock.
From the opening clicks of the metronome on “I See It Too,” those familiar with the band’s older work will notice immediately a shift in style from the previous releases. The song has a full four minute introduction, and clocks in at around 10 minutes, a departure from the way their older releases seemed to jump right into the thick of things. This threw me off at first, and to be honest, I have a tendency to skip past the intro most times, but I’m glad it’s there. It gives the song an epic start, and really sets the tone for the rest of the album to come. After an intense ending, the band flows into the cd’s first segue track. These tracks aren’t all instrumental, but serve the same sort of purpose as a buffer between songs. While I think the idea is cool, these tend to drag a little for me, and are a low point of the album. In all, the 9 track album ends up only having six full songs, but these songs have enough meat to them to keep the listener satisfied.
By far, the best songs on this CD are (through hallways) and Born Again So Many Times You Forget You Are. Through Hallways is probably the catchiest song the band has ever written. Clocking in at 3:20, this is a perfect example of BLA’s poppier side, and has an amazing use of horns. It’s just catchy as hell, and the bridge that first shows up at 1:18 is one of the coolest, most clever turns I’ve heard in a song in a very long time. The verby vocal line and horns that close the song make it feel a ton more epic than a 3 minute emo song should, and the clicky drums that exit the song out are a great way to end things. As for Born Again, the song is epic on a scale that no other band like this has ever reached. It’s like the emo equivalent of Heart of the Sunrise. The vocal line is impressively laid out, and the ten minute song never drags for a moment. My absolute favorite part of the song is a three second guitar turn after an ambient keyboard part at 2:19 – and that brings me to my absolute favorite thing about this band. It’s not their big picture, which admittedly has been improved a great deal on this release. It’s the little details, the painstaking, minute, seconds long ideas that never repeat, and could so easily be looked over. Only with my absolute favorite bands – The Beatles, On the Might of Princes, Braid, Pavement, and few others – have I ever kept repeating a two-second part over and over just to appreciate how much can be said with so little. With this release, I find myself doing just that all across the album.
The negatives on Masked Dancers are few, but I should mention them for posterity. First, as noted above, the transition songs have a tendency to drag on longer than they should. It also would’ve been nice to not hear so many sound effects repeated from earlier releases. They’re actually used better on this CD, but I just think it feels a little lazy that the band couldn’t find any new tones from the hundreds of classic videogames out there that would’ve had a similar effect. Another thing is that, while it does feel like a more unified release, it's hard not to miss the variety that their older releases had. It almost feels unfair to complain about this, because I love the album's unification, but it's one of the things I loved about the previous releases. Finally, as enthusiastic as he is, there are just some people who are going to hate the singer’s voice. I am not one of these, and I think he brings a stunning level of emotion to his singing, and writes downright wonderful vocal lines. Still, it’s an acquired taste for sure, and one that I’m sure will turn some people off from the release.
Beyond all that, this CD is an incredible effort and my absolute top pick of 2009. It manages to simultaneously feel like something that came directly out of my head, and yet something so wild and clever that I could never think of. They represent something pure, unfettered by the rock and role-play fantasies that have corrupted the genre over the years and made possible all the horrid screamo of the mid-2000s Warped Tour scene. The BLA is everything that the bands at the start of the early 90s emo scene aspired to be, and pull it off with a rare mix of technical skill and unbridled exuberance that only comes around when and from where you least expect it. This band is the best modern emo band – better than Algernon, better than Look Mexico, better than Bridge and Tunnel - better than all of those other buzzy blog bands that people talk about on the internet. This album, to me, is the modern equivalent of Analphabetapolothology, and while it may not be the ground-breaking, innovative, culturally significant work that the Kinsella brothers put out in the early 90s, it deserves a place in every iPod that has ever held a Cap’n Jazz song.
Posts
