The first track on Dearly Beloved is really cool. It’s like this really fucked up psych-folk song with crazy effects on the vocals. Sort of like an evil spirit has possessed a children’s record. A demonic spiritual or something And the first few tracks maintain this madness, almost makes you want to scream. It’s just so fucked up and thrown together. With slowly grunting hoedown type vocals, lots of effected sounds and just a general weirdness.
Had the entire album maintained this style I would be praising it to the high heavens. Unfortunately following the depressive downer ballad blues of Gonna Wanna, it all seems to fall apart.
It turns into some pseudo intellectual overly emotional over the top love record. You know the type where it’s trying to be as earnest as possible, revealing to the world what an emotional fellow Theo is. he writes deep and meaningful folk songs. Unfortunately I don’t think he is.
Well that’s not fair I mean I‘m sure he is, but hell he just can’t write a decent song that expresses that. Maybe in person he very eloquently expresses these deep insightful feelings, but he can’t write like that at all. Just sort of lingering in that new folk style of trying oh so hard, but not really getting anywhere.
I mean it is the weirdness that makes the beginning cool, but it goes form strange to painfully generic. And unfortunately the rest of the album continues in this style, ignoring the interesting schizophrenia of the first few tracks in favour of attempts at sounding important.
It’s sad, that crazy folk shit was really awesome. I want to hear more of that. I don’t care about singer/songwriter crap. Well unless it is really amazingly good, but here it just isn’t.
Too bad really. I guess better luck next time, I don’t know… Maybe smoke some more reefer or something. Seeing as there are a lot of people that like this type of sound though, I’m sure a lot of people will love it.
If you like modern folk, pseudo poetic trappings you will really love this. I mean I’m sure it is really well done in that style, especially with that ability shown on those few good tracks, the rest of it must be great for that style. Doubt it will change your life though.
