Saturday, November 18, 2006

Another recent find

One thing that really keeps me listening to music through periods of boredom is the random surprise you’ll get from a record you never expected to be good or never expected to even listen to at all. When I heard the Dresden Doll’s single “Coin-Operated Boy” early last year, I was slightly turned off by its cabaret kitschiness. At the moment, this aversion towards cabaret is a bit difficult to explain, but needless to say it pushed the name Dresden Dolls to the back of my mind for a good year and a half.

Unexpectedly, a couple of weeks ago I began listening to them once again. This time it was because my girlfriend downloaded their last album “Yes Virginia.” As you can already gather, I was surprised and excited by the album. The first track, “Sex Changes” put aside most of the kitsch that characterized their past single. Filling that resulting vacuum was the kind of raw passion and energy that one usually associates with punk coming primarily from the urgency of the drum part but also that of the piano. This use of a punk mentality with instrument unconventional for the genre leads me to compare the group to Mates of State who achieve a very similar effect from bass, drums, and organ most of the time.

The cabaret flavor tends to remain slightly in some of the piano parts, but it has a stronger presence in the affectations in the vocals. Paired oftentimes with dark and comical imagery in the vocals, the Weimar-era cabaret influences tend to accentuate lyrics. To my ear, this background for the group no longer pushes me aside, but rather directs me attention towards the vocals and the absurdly dark stories that they tell in songs like “Dirty Business.”

However, there are some songs that disrupt this formula: the second track, “Backstabber,” unfortunately begins to sound like a mediocre Ben Folds replication. If it weren’t for the dramatic vocals that are at times characteristic of the Dresden Dolls, the song would be entirely hopeless. Another instance of this is “First Orgasm,” which feels like a joke whose punch line is coming soon, but as each moment passes you begin to lose hope that the song really is in fact going anywhere at all.

As a whole, the album’s unconventionally punk approach by far outweighs the moments of mediocrity and boredom – at least they do at this moment. You may have to ask me how I still feel about the album in a month, but this is one of the few pleasant musical surprises I’ve had in the past few months.

All About Me

Kiryu-shi, Gunma-ken, Japan
I'm currently living in a small Japanese city at the foothills of mountains about 75 miles northwest of Tokyo. A lot of time is spent absorbing the culture in large doses; and when that gets old, I turn to the Internet.