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REVIEWS:
Over the past few years, Baltimore, Maryland’s
LandSpeedRecord! has built a solid reputation for itself
with its quirky songwriting and frantic musical execution.
LSR! has always managed to be both catchy and somewhat
inaccessible at the same time, which seems to have created
multiple love/hate relationships with the band. The band’s
lyrics have always generally been even more hyperactive
and varied than the band’s music, and Charley Jamison’s
unique vocal delivery (alarming without hitting ‘shrill’
level) only gives LSR!’s material an even larger
sense of musical urgency.
With Intermission, though, it seems that
LSR! has toned things down a bit and offered up a surprisingly
mature album. After going through multiple personnel changes
over the past few years, Jamison and company have settled
on a four-piece lineup that includes a cello player (Corrie
LoGiudice) – a decision that seems to have affected
both the songwriting style and overall sound of the band.
Despite the oftentimes bright, upbeat musical
colorings of previous LSR! material, the band’s moods
and themes tended to lean towards intelligently dark material.
Sure, the supremely fast-paced, quick lick material may
not be present on Intermission, but if anything, the addition
of the cello to this set of more deliberate material actually
makes Intermission LSR!’s most legitimately dark
album yet. One HUGE constant, however, is the continuation
of LSR!’s tendency to field amazing rhythm sections
(fleshed out on Intermission by bassist Paul Gier and
drummer Jeff Bradford, with former bassist Thomas Stehr
helping out on a few tracks as well).
While the band may have shelved some of
its ‘random freak-out’ edge, that tendency is
replaced by some of the band’s best-developed material
to date. “The Linda Lovelace Memorial Fund”
unfurls slowly, as the song’s initial fuzzed-out
drone-stomp melts away into a delicate acoustic bridge,
setting up the resurgence of a passionate redux of the
song’s chorus. Both lyrically and musically, album
closer “Why Ask Why” is just plain fundamentally
unnerving, talking of missing children, mortified parents,
pedophiles, and the like. It seems that the slight cello
touches throughout the song actually manage to make the
song even creepier, though, as they add a sense of underlying
terror to the song. The last 90 seconds are rounded out
with a spooky sounding instrumental set, closing the disc
on a positively eerie note. The sparse, spooky cello-and-guitar
riffing of “Mr. Reeves” is only two-and-a-half
minutes long, but by the time the song glides into the
sweet-sounding slide guitar break, the track has easily
established itself as one of the album’s most noteworthy
points.
The opening to “Guardian Angel”
is vintage LSR!, though the track quickly shifts to a
much darker drum-and-bass tune, with cello noodlings emphasizing
the dark lyrical content of the song (“A woman on
a bridge drops one twin with the other one in her arms
/ As the second one his the water, she yells, ‘I
didn’t mean them any harm’ / They fish the first
one out right away, but they don’t find the second
one for days / There’s no reason that the twin who
lives isn’t the twin who floats away”). “Crack”
is about as close to sustained, old-school LSR! as Intermission
comes; the three-minute opener is a sneakily powerful
three-minute deliberate rocker, though even on this track,
the underlying cello backing adds a creepy touch. The
surprisingly straight-laced “Glass Bricks” offers
up yet another powerful nugget of LSR! lyricism (“...And
the distance wasn’t as far as we thought between
the nothing we’ll have and the whatever-we-got /
Everything will work out is the mantra of the damned”).
“Oedipux Rex Applause” is a subdued,
toe-tapping 90-second frolic with a walking bassline that
alternately seems as out of place as it does perfectly
embedded into the album. The cynical “Malthusian
Second Helpings” grinds along on the somewhat dissonant
combination of Jamison’s dirty guitar line and LoGiudice’s
sorrowful cello playing, while the lulling “Welcome
to Baltimore” manages to sound both fractured and
beautiful at the same time.
“Instrumental With Words” (which
actually is completely instrumental) shows that LSR! still
has its trademark sense of humor. However, on Intermission,
humor and offbeat showmanship has given way to well-controlled
musical chaos, and the results add up to another solid
release for LandSpeedRecord!. The band’s lyrics are
still amongst the most interesting reads in rock, which
only adds to the depth of the album. This one’s not
quite as perversely entertaining as the band’s previous
releases, but all in all, repeated listens drive home
the fact that Intermission might legitimately be LSR!’s
best album to date. Highly recommended.
–
Delusions of Adequacy
reviewed by Gary Blackwell
(Pick of the Week, 10/08/04)
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