A large chunk of the music in The Free Bin unsurprisingly falls into the category of “indie rock” so I feel as if I've been bit remiss for skipping the genre thus far. In an effort to make amends, this week I plucked out what I deemed to be one of the more indie-hipster looking CDs in the bunch, “Sun Valley” by Los Angeles/Brooklyn outfit Soulo. “Sun Valley's” cover and packaging feature photos of sun bleached urban/desert landscapes (presumably in Sun Valley, CA) in a kind of ironic celebration of the American mundane so I figured I was dealing with some disenfranchised artsy guys rocking out and railing against The Man and the creeping boundaries of our mindless mainstream society.
On paper, I like Soulo's approach on “Sun Valley” which boils down to taking simple melodic and harmonic phrases and stretching them out into full tracks, investigating textural possibilities in a mellow electronica-slash-folk setting. Strings and horns, spacey reverb and multi-layered vocal overdubs are among the techniques the band employs to fill out the sound. In the right hands, this recipe could yield fascinating results both intellectually and aesthetically but for such a project to succeed, the ideas being explored would have to have at least some sort of hook or intrinsically pleasing qualities. This is where “Sun Valley” falters.
It turns out the contents within are just about as un-rocking and uninspiring as the dusty abandoned construction sites on the packaging as the underlying thematic material they've been built upon proves to be a weak foundation for interesting music. Sleepy melodies come off as annoyingly sparse, almost comical in their lack of musical meat. Style is substituted for substance as more and more vanilla vocal overdubs embellish aggravatingly repetitive verses. For a band embracing such minimal melodic ideas, they're not really into the “less is more” philosophy when it comes to production techniques.
The resulting atmosphere that pervades the recording is one of lazy-sounding indifference making “Sun Valley” perhaps the perfect theme music for the bored teenager who wants nothing more than to sit inside and feel alienated. I knew plenty of kids like that back in the day but even they would have seen through the veneer of this exercise in superficiality and would have switched back to Punk Rock or the Grateful Dead.
The opening track, “Up Where the Clouds Come Down” develops patiently, voices echo as if in a church or a canyon until the band kicks in and the music morphs from a Gregorian Chant into a blandly rocking 6/8 that floats along while super-reverbed voices moan on and on about clouds. As more layers are added and strings lend some sonic oomph to the proceedings, a relatively entertaining climax is achieved though one could forgive the listener for having already bailed and hit the track-forward button.
Subsequent tunes plod ahead at roughly the same dirge-y pace, as extra sound effects or additional layers of vocal overdub continue to take the place of worthwhile compositional ideas. Some interesting musical nuggets can be heard here or there but they tend to, frustratingly, end as soon as they've begun. In fact, it seems there is an inverse relationship between the aesthetic appeal of a motif and the prominence it is given on “Sun Valley.” On one of the few mildly entertaining tracks, “Let Me Die In My Footsteps,” (a Bob Dylan cover) there is a chord sustained by a horn section (or synthesized horns) for literally three seconds which reminds me how much fun I could be having if only I was listening to something else.
Halfway through the CD, I take pleasure where I can find it: Track number six is brilliant if only for its title,“Holding Pattern,” which is particularly apt since it is at this point that I felt like I'm completely trapped in an aluminum tube and being driven around in circles. I don't know what the musical analogy to kicking open an emergency door and jumping out at 30,000 feet is but when I think of it I'll let you know.
The only rumble strip in this ride that actually might wake the listener up is “Monkey,” a Pixies-lite instrumental groove that builds an intensity palpable enough to actually care about but even this gesture is empty as it immediately followed by the excruciatingly dull “Send My Face” which seems like a further distillation of Soulo's vacuous compositional style.
Unsurprisingly “Sun Valley” ends with a whimper not a bang and I'm left with a feeling of someone who has been left out of an inside joke. If the point of the recording was to simulate a completely joyless listening experience then congratulations to Soulo on an unequivocal success! Note: I still resent having sat through it multiple times. Of course, not being one for conspiracy theories, I can't bring myself to believe that “Sun Valley” was crafted as a cynical gag. The much more plausible explanation that the music sucks.
