“Strange Girl,” the first track on I See You. Your Eyes Are Red, is a fairly apt description of the initial impression the album; you get a good helping of “strange” instrumentation anchored by fairly straightforward vocals by Julia Tepper, best known perhaps for providing backup vocals on Manners, and who is – you guessed it – female. I put strange in quotes because when you get down to it, despite obvious appeal to the contrary, the music itself isn’t that strange at all. Varying from rock music backed by an electronic orchestra to Christmas-themed rock music backed by an electronic orchestra, all tied up, for the most part, by pop song structure, it’s likely you’ve heard something like this before. “Strange,” in this case, is an aesthetic, or maybe an attitude. It’s why the word can evoke Unexpect as easily as Steam Powered Giraffe or Beefheart, though I can imagine fans of the latter currently gathering various implements of torture for using him in that list.
Still, I think it’s pretty apparent when someone is going for that “quirky and weird” vibe, and that hits home here everywhere: from the lyrics (ex – recitations of “I’m not hungry but I’ll take a bite” and “will you still feed me?” I’m going to let you guess which track that is.) to the image to, of course, that same, driving compositional flair. That’s an observation, not a critique. The critique comes into play in regard to how they go about it.
For all the aggressive, off-beat oddity of tracks like “Dutch Master” – which sounds more like a jam session than thought-out and purposeful design – it’s moments like the subtle, growing groove of “Stoned Alone” that have the most significant impact. The change is equally jarring – who knew you could go from atmospheric and moody to groovy so quickly and have it be great? – but it does so in a way that feels natural. The off-kilter changeup of the previous song has no build-up, moving from a section that is already distinct for its abrasiveness to another that is equally biting before resolving in a way that is itself combative, even making use of silence – by letting the ending note go on a bit too long – as what is essentially an aural weapon (John Cage eat your heart out). You might argue “that’s what the going for” and I suppose my only retort would be…good job? Inanity for the sake of inanity is neither parody nor methodology, it’s inanity, and if “Dutch Master” isn’t that, “You Drank All the Egg Nog” – which offers a rendition of “Sleigh Bells” for its bridge – certainly is.
Thankfully, though the attitude of the weird is still continually present, Friend Roulette makes much better use of it in the rest of the tracks. For the most part, the tracks can be divided into two categories: slower and more orchestra-focused or more akin to indie pop. Interestingly, they choose to keep two of the best tracks for the end, each representing a little bit of those categorizations with a twist. The closer, “Warm Year,” gives the album’s excellent male/female vocal harmonies more of a central role; combined with a near-perfect sense of pacing, it only further supports the already-established repertoire of pop tunes the album has to offer (mainly referring to “Strange Girl” and “Stoned Alone”).
“Up In The Air” offers an interesting retort to “Dutch Master.” While marked by compositional choices less explicitly odd, there is one particular shift toward the bridge that catches one completely off-guard, moving from the atmospherics dotted throughout the album to an intense section that can – again – only be called groovy. It feels as though much the same line of reasoning is utilized here that “Dutch Master” had previously tried to master, and to much greater effect. Likewise with “Up In the Air,” the pacing gives it the edge that its grandiosity requires, in addition to it being at least a hair more subtle, and if nothing else the band has established it can write a damn good groove.
If the problems and successes of this album ended at just a tit-for-tat of promising experimentation vs. failed execution, the former would win out by a large margin. However, there’s another point that, while I don’t normally find an integral factor on a rock album, is so botched that there’s no way not to bring it up, and that is of course the production. As I said earlier, the album is anchored by its main vocalist, and this extends beyond composition; the songs are often vocal-centric, but the vocals are also pushed up so much in the mixing that it drowns out many of the other instruments. It’s absolutely frustrating having to struggle to hear an interesting use of sax or flute. In the producer’s defense, most of the instruments on here are mid-range instruments, and as such it can be difficult to try to make all of them rest peaceably with each other.
Moreover, on the songs featuring instrumentation that shifts in and out consistently, or that has a more stripped-down structure altogether, it sounds great, if a little mid-reliant – the should-be-lead-single, “Stoned Alone,” in particular is a good example of this done right. But the mid-range is so cluttered and the vocals are so dominating that the orchestral element often takes a backseat to the vocals even when it isn’t intended to do so, and that’s only exacerbated by the somewhat limited range of vocal techniques Tepper employs.
With I See You. Your Eyes Are Red., Friend Roulette manage to experiment with their style, move forward as artists, and write music that is alternately catchy and creative (if not always at the same time). That’s a feat in of itself worth praise, but this looks like another case of a “step in the right direction” album; “disjointed” would probably be taken as praise by the band, but it’s likely not quite the same for listeners. By forcing themselves into the little aesthetic box they’ve made for themselves, they also subject themselves to tokenism. They have the potential to be much more than that, but not on this record.
6/10
Good
Track List:
- Strange Girl
- Dutch Master
- Stoned Alone
- You Drank All The Egg Nog
- Gardens Tidings
- Feed
- Up In The Air
- Warm Year
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Tour Dates
June 04 Brooklyn, NY Secret Project Robot
June 18 Brooklyn, NY Palisades
June 26 Richmond, VA Gallery 5
June 27 Harrisonburg, VA Crayola
July 28 New York, NY (Le) Poisson Rouge
Michael Rambling 