When I span The Village Green’s debut LP for the first time, I was hungry. And I don’t mean the kind of hunger you get from an empty belly, where you wander to Safeway and spend a hundred and sixty dollars on your weekly grocery shopping trip, only to get home and wonder what recipe could possibly combine a gallon of cookie dough and four jars of gefilte fish. No, a different kind of hunger now beset my soul: a hunger for rock. Since you’re hip enough to be at this website, you surely know that “quiet is the new loud.” Sufjan Stevens, Jose Gonzalez, Alexi Murdock – the folk rock is all well and good, and I’m definitely a subscriber. But occasionally, such artists can leave me wanting music that moves not only my soul, but my body – maybe not into a groove per se, but at least into some sort of air-drumming posture.
After I heard the pre-released free track “When the Creepers Creep In,” I set my expectations for some balls-to-the-wall post-punk revivalist fare. However, while the balls do remain fairly close to the wall throughout the album, further inspection reveals that it’s a substantially more varied album of solid, highly palatable rock and roll.
While it’s not all post-punk, it is, however, hard not to draw a myriad of other time-spanning rock comparisons when listening to The Village Green. The searing feedback in the breakdown of “Mossy Rock” recalls Neil Young’s “Dangerbird.” The 12-bar blues outro of “Yelm (Revisited)” could fit right alongside “The End” and “Come Together” on Abbey Road. I have mixed feelings about these sorts of musical references and similarities, as most listeners probably do and should. It’s catchy, it’s familiar, it’s fun, but is it cheap or stagnant? The last thing the music world needs is another Jet regurgitating Beatles tunes into the clambering beaks of popular rock listeners. The key is in how it’s done. Thankfully, the Village Green isn’t rehashing. There’s no formula for how to draw strongly from powerful and classic influences without sounding imitative, but The Village Green is walking that line successfully. They sound energetic, fresh, and sincere while letting you know that they too happen to think Neil Young was soloing at his finest on Zuma.
Appreciably, The Village Green also has a good sense of how to shape and time a song, something many bands could take a lesson from these days. In “Om: The Meaning of Life,” one of only two tracks over five minutes long, the song changes direction dramatically at three and four minutes while maintaining the same spirit. In the medium-paced “Wrap Your Love Around Me,” they sparingly drop hints at a bluesier, more distorted underbelly in the first couple verses before letting you know what they were getting at with a nice solo two thirds in. The punchy “Bullet to the Head” resists a drawn-out jam in favor of intense spurts of guitar somewhere between a fill and a solo after each chorus. It never leaves you bored enough to ask when a song or even a song part will be ending.
Nobody’s perfect, and the biggest room for improvement for The Village Green is left in the lyrics. In “Life on the Run,” the verse mantra is “I life my life on the run,” while the chorus proclaims, “She’s never gonna give it up, never never gonna give it up, no.” The life of the ramblin’ man and the unattainable girl are both tried-and-true rock themes, but they don’t do a convincing job connecting them here. Most of the time the words fill in the songs suitably, but in cases such as this they can distract somewhat from the band’s musical strength.
All in all, Feeling the Fall is rewarding from the first spin and is an extremely promising debut from a band that has all the signs of moving in the right direction. |