Tom Vek’s WE HAVE SOUND is for the indie kids who don’t need anybody to teach them to dance. Riding on the attention garnered on blog-dom and U.S. festivals like SXSW and CMJ, the efforts of the twenty-four-year old Londoner finally cross the Atlantic to be played loudly over the speakers, setting limbs a-flying with i-pod-ad spasms of fun.
Crafting an album born out of interest in experimentation with multiple instruments and sampling, Vek, who sings and plays everything on his record, shows himself to be a talented and varied dabbler, a veritable one-man band. He is well-versed in the various dialects of musical hipster-ese, mixing and matching disparate elements together neatly into a cool-toned, scraggly jigsaw. A dollop of funk and fuzz here, a pinch of groove and electro-sound there, it’s an anti-soufflé so please, turn up the volume.
The comparisons thus run the gamut from Franz Ferdinand to Bloc Party to Talking Heads, with even less usefulness than usual. Many purport to find this relative newcomer the English heir (and hair) to the crown of Beck and the musical resemblance strikes a chord in the earlier middle tracks of the album. Connections or no, the rollicking “If I Had Changed My Mind” and “The Lower the Sun” stood out as my favorites, although the angular energy and soaring falsettos of “I Ain’t Saying My Goodbyes” (first cousin of “House of Jealous Lovers”) along with the bass o’funk and cowbell a-plenty of “If You Want” are perfectly poised to take over the bodies and minds at live shows and dance floors.
Still, the rather inane and unremarkable lyrics teamed with uneven vocals prove to be too much competition for all the other party-in-your-ear sounds, even with those pretty killer bass lines. There’s a lot of girl and baby and you and me and driving in cars and mild ‘tude and cigarette smoke. On the last track, Vek asks a stumper, “How many radiators have you got on in your house/Do they make you feel warm at night/And do they tell you what to do,” and more than anything else, I’d just like to stop a moment and hear how Ms. Baby Girl Cool in the passenger seat chooses to respond.
There’s a certain lack of crazy spark that the nature of the music implies, which I hope Vek will develop along with some substance and vocal heart. He plays well with the loose boundaries of genre, not with leaps and bounds, but a catchy skip and hop. The overall result is a somehow formulaic sort of low-fi rawness, a result that calls for perhaps a little more steak knife edge rather than butter-knife bend. But maybe that doesn’t matter when your mind’s on your electro-rock-funk dance dance revolution. |