{"id":3356,"date":"2014-05-19T20:06:35","date_gmt":"2014-05-20T00:06:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=3356"},"modified":"2014-08-04T09:47:18","modified_gmt":"2014-08-04T13:47:18","slug":"odludek","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2014\/05\/19\/odludek\/","title":{"rendered":"Odludek."},"content":{"rendered":"

Jimi Goodwin, lead singer and bassist for the popular British rock band Doves, recently released his first solo album, Odludek<\/a>\"\"<\/i>, while the group is on an indefinite hiatus. I was a longtime Doves fan for their eclectic approach to each album, use of heavily textured music that often recalled their brief time as an electronic act called Sub Sub, including the landmark The Last Broadcast<\/a>\"\"<\/i>, which hit #1 in the UK and produced a top ten hit in \u201cThere Goes the Fear.\u201d Doves never found much traction in the U.S. \u2013 Broadcast<\/i> peaked at #83 here and none of their singles charted \u2013 but that hasn’t deterred Goodwin from making a Doves-like album, even weirder on some songs than the most experimental Doves material, but far less even than his old band’s best releases.<\/p>\n

Goodwin crosses many genres on Odludek<\/i>, from ’70s funk-inflected tracks like the opener \u201cTerracotta Warrior\u201d to the electronic influences of \u201cLive Like a River.\u201d Oddly enough, however, the strongest moments on Odludek<\/i> are when Goodwin goes acoustic, borrowing from the same source material that drives artists like Mumford and Sons and even underlies the sanitized Irish folk songs of Celtic Woman. \u201cHope,\u201d \u201cOh Whiskey,\u201d and the brilliant closer \u201cPanic Tree\u201d are all built on familiar acoustic guitar rhythms, each bringing a different twist to the format to avoid the \u201cI’ve heard this before\u201d feeling of the various knockoff acts sailing in the wake of Mumford’s first album (and I’d include their second album in that category). \u201cOh Whiskey\u201d comes along like a drinking song, a plea to a different kind of spirit to bring him patience or empathy \u2013 but not the blues. \u201cHope\u201d finds Goodwin singing beyond his range to begin the song, but gains intensity with the deep harmonies behind the chorus reminiscent of Negro spirituals. \u201cPanic Tree\u201d tells a family history of anxiety via the metaphor of, yes, a tree growing in the yard for generations, a serious subject treated with humor over music that sounds like it’s lifted from a nursery rhyme or a Raffi album.<\/p>\n

The common thread tying the album together is a sense of musical exploration, grafting sounds on to each other even though the immediate connection isn’t apparent. That supports some of the weaker tracks where Goodwin cranks up the distortion and the tempo, as on \u201cTerracotta Warrior,\u201d which has horn-heavy breaks in between the heavily strummed guitar lines. Unfortunately Goodwin’s songwriting suffers as he tries to ramp up the complexity; \u201cLonely at the Drop,\u201d an acoustic\/electric track with lyrics that offer a bitter attack on Christianity, opens with a guitar riff we’ve heard a thousand times before and moves like a car that’s driving without a destination. \u201cMan V Dingo,\u201d the album’s most eccentric track, rides a dissonant riff too long \u2013 a tritone just begs for a resolution at some point \u2013 and comes across like an attempt to mimic freeform jazz in a rock format. The slowest tracks, \u201cKeep My Soul in Song\u201d and \u201cDidsbury Girl,\u201d pass by without making any impact, musical neutrinos that don’t showcase any melody or technical skill.<\/p>\n

Doves may not return to the studio any time soon \u2013 the band hasn’t officially broken up, but it sounds like it’ll be a while before we get new material, if at all \u2013 and I was hoping a great Goodwin solo album would tide me over, but Odludek<\/i> falls short of the mark. While the three strong acoustic tracks show off his sense of melody and make better use of his wry lyrical voice, the remainder of the album doesn’t have the hooks to justify the experimentation, and the lack of consistency across the ten tracks only seems to emphasize its lack of strong melodic elements.<\/p>\n

\u2013<\/p>\n

I won’t give Courtney Barnett’s The Double Ep: A Sea of Split Peas<\/a>\"\"<\/i> a full review, but there are two standout tracks on the album, which features brilliant (if weird) lyrics set to some pretty simple music. Most of the time Barnett seems to be sing-talking over her guitar, but \u201cAvant Gardener\u201d (available free<\/a> on amazon right now) and \u201cHistory Eraser\u201d have actual melodies to go along with the insane stories she’s telling. \u201cAvant Gardener\u201d turns a routine afternoon going outside, picking weeds and preparing to plant a garden, into an asthma attack that sends her to the hospital; on the way she observes that the parademic \u201cthinks I’m clever because I play guitar\/I think she’s clever ’cause she stops people dying.\u201d Meanwhile, \u201cHistory Eraser\u201d tells of a drunken evening in a style that mimics the meandering, stream-of-consciousness thinking of an inebriated person, but with tons of wordplay, assonance, and allusions that you’d have a hard time conceiving if you were sloshed. She’s one to watch if those two songs are any indicator of what she’s capable of writing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jimi Goodwin, lead singer and bassist for the popular British rock band Doves, recently released his first solo album, Odludek, while the group is on an indefinite hiatus. I was a longtime Doves fan for their eclectic approach to each album, use of heavily textured music that often recalled their brief time as an electronic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[779,359,763,748,852],"class_list":["post-3356","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-2014-in-music","tag-alternative","tag-australian-music","tag-british-music","tag-music","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3356","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3356"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3356\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3357,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3356\/revisions\/3357"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}