Felt- Forever Breathes the Lonely Word
Despite the album cover, this is a pretty fun and energetic album. There’s one or two slow songs, but for the most part this is fast paced pop music. That’s really apparent in the strict structure of each song, verse-verse-chorus- solo etc,. In fact it’s so well structured that this feels like a perfect collection of songs. So then why am I unmoved by it?
I contend that perfection is boring. It’s the rough edges that give something it’s charm, because that’s when you see that it was made by somebody. You see the artist’s fingerprints. For example, look at Revolver. I don’t like every song on that album on the same level. I’ll even go so far as to say that Sgt. Pepper’s is a more cohesive album. But without those ups and downs, without just a bit of disjointedness, the album becomes boring and tasteless, like a stew without salt. It’s why I’ve never been a huge fan of John Singer Sargent. He’s just too good for his own good.
What we have here is somebody trying to be too good for their own good, and somewhat succeeding. And that success is the worst part of the album. Each song bleeds one into the other in a blank screen of perfection. The one exception is the song “All the People I Like are Those That are Dead” which is so awkward it sticks out like an unhammered nail. But I like it because its where the pretensions of the singer, who goes by Lawrence and just Lawrence, are made apparent. He thinks that that title is deep and elegant, when really its been said better by about a million other antisocial teenagers through the years. At last I see Lawrence as a human, albeit a flawed one.
And that’s not to say there’s nothing brilliant here, there is. The lyrics at times are good bordering on great, and the instrumentation is fine as well. Taken individually each song is very good, but combined, the result is less than the sum of its parts. And I say that each song by itself is good, but each song also has a sound that begs to be put in context of the album. So each song is less of a jewel, intricately wrought and shining on its own, and more of a colored plastic bead that’s been combined with other beads to form a Mardi Gras necklace.
2/5 Listen to one or two songs off this album just to get the sound, but you don’t have to listen to the rest. This is just one of ten albums by Felt, and I’ll check out a couple of those just out of curiosity, but right now I wouldn’t ask anybody else to do the same. I was disappointed with this album. I was so excited when I first heard it. I thought the sound was so cool, it reminded me somewhat of Gene Clark, but all the album gave me was that sound and some pretty good lyrics. I now think I was foolish to make that comparison.