The PhiLL(er)



Songs from the Abattoir Cover
Grumpy Bear

Songs from the Abattoir
Abandoned Love Records

So this album starts out a little worryingly too much like that one Coldplay song, albeit with more entrancing lyrics, just an organ and a voice, but then some other things start adding themselves in and suddenly the whole thing turns into jaunty acousticy, low-fi glory pop and I'm smiling my face off at these guys. And then it slows down again to a halfway point. And then speeds back up. And so on, and so forth. This is just the first song. It's five minutes long and never dull. I hope it's not pejorative to say this is friendly and comfortable music, because I mean it in a complimentary way. The second song sounds a little like the Magnetic Fields and more like the Russian Futurists, and I have no problem with that, especially because the opening line is "In Chicago, the place where all the wind blows." Elsewhere we get some nice trumpet playing and good work using the string section button on the synthesizer. There's a hippy-ish feel to this record, and again, that's something I might think is a pejorative elsewhere, but here it's by no means the case. Think of hippyish in the way the Byrds were—and remember that those guys wrote "Eight Miles High" and were also the sweethearts of the rodeo. By track four we're listening to some sort of Violent Femmes meets punk rock on quaaludes. The next one is a patchwork of spliced sounds: voices, pianos, what sounds like doors opening and closing, ambient noises. It's called "Fritz Lang", so for all I know it's put together from noises from that guy's films. The album ends with a sweet guitar, banjo, mandolin and piano number. I think Grumpy Bear ran a lint brush over the entire history of rock 'n' roll and turned it into this cd. I likes.