If Skeletons & the Girl Faced Boys stopped trying to write in any sort of conventional song structure, Git, their third LP, might’ve been something incredibly special. There are instances on the album that are excitingly beautiful and moving, but as a whole Git escapes being formulaic but not in any exceedingly pleasing way.
The album is filled with percussion and keyboards and laserish sounds shooting from speaker to speaker. Opener ‘See the Way’ is a funked-out dance pop song, and while not necessarily boring the song is insistently unmelodic. The band seems to have the idea right (the one about how tons of sounds coming out of everywhere at every moment is wickedly exciting to listen to in the form of pop songs) but have done little to enhance the melodious, tune quality to the sounds they make. The vocals on ‘We Won’t Be Proud, No No No’ are not sung badly, it’s just that they aren’t sung with any lack or excess of vitality; the guitar on ‘There Are Seagulls Who Live in Parking Lots’ is accomplished and has a presence, but it lacks a definitiveness, it lacks the feeling that it belongs there.
Skeletons are at their best on Git when they don’t worry about song-structure and just strike upon a groove or infectious melody and stick to it. The beginning of ‘Ya’ll Thinks It’s So Easy’ builds itself up with jungle rhythms on percussion, intense and captivating, but it’s only a trick as the catharsis promised in the build up is forgotten as merely an ‘intro’ to a regular popish dance song. ‘There’s a Fly In Your Soup and I Put It There,’ the best song on the record, is extravagantly wonderful and beautifully comforting in its squarbles and rumbles and wavering, processed vocals, reminiscent of Mum’s Finally We Are No One: an otherworldly beauty.
Skeletons would also do best to include the flute as much as possible, as it plays a lovely role in the otherwise overbearing ‘You’da Been Better Off’ and the end of ‘Seagulls’ is a thrilling arrangement of flutes fluttering about, willy-nilly yet melodic. Perhaps the only fully successful song (aside from ‘There’s a Fly’) on the LP is ‘While We Were at the Movies,’ with its two-chord piano and pretty melody holding together the peace amidst a rabble of computerized lasers and glitches and bursts of sound, which are featured throughout the album but are more a bother than a delight.
If ‘There’s a Fly’ were the A-side and ‘Movies’ the B-side it’d be one of the best singles to stumble upon and we’d tell all our friends and they’d all want to hear it. But Git as a whole is burdensome and, perhaps because it was labored upon so mightily (or at least it sounds so), it is altogether too crowded for its own good. |