ALBUM REVIEWS
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ALBUM REVIEWS |
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The pAper chAse
SOMEDAY THIS COULD ALL BE YOURS (PART 1) SOUTHERN Out now @www.vanguard-online.co.uk
Big, full of thudding drums (from new drummer, Jason Garner) and portentous themes, this is a narrative-heavy album. First track, “If Nobody Moves Nobody Will Get Hurt (The Extinction)”, sets the scene as it lays out the existential crisis in John Congleton’s mind – that the universe exterminates its population – bit by bit with fires, floods and plague – all in all at the end, with an apparently finite universe, where else is there to live when it ends? Using story songs and clips of sound, he explores all the ways in which the world will end us before our time. A film-clip soundbite suggests a Zen-like approach of seeing the paradox that what makes us kills us as indicative of a deeper truth, just out of reach. The music of The Paper Chase isn’t as subtle as the thoughts and the lesson might have been a pamphlet as readily as an album. That said, these are good pieces of drama-music and I can see, in my mind’s eye, a stage show orchestrated by these guys, with an off-Broadway cast being hammered though tornadoes, forest fires, epidemics, hysteria, comets from the skies, lightning, blizzards and other perils. The power of the music is like the thunder accompanying some natural disaster and my ears become accustomed to the classic indie-outsider vocals of John (at first I keep expecting some quirky irony like others of his ilk). The sound really is extra loud and deep as the album progresses and more and more of the human race is threatened and exterminated up to the point where irony hits meltdown with a chorus of “he’s got the whole world in his hands”. It does rather make the death obsession of certain emo and metal bands look lighthearted, since The Paper Chase have it all thought through right the way to an absence of light at the end of the tunnel. A christening, wedding or barmitzvah would be enhanced no end by soundtracking with this…… www.southern.com |
