this cd is a direct descendant of the future sound of london's the isness, but it improves on the original idea. when fsol departed from strictly electronic music and embarked on their new age pseudo-spiritual hippie revival, i was well pleased. i'll admit that i'm a sucker for the hippie sound: throw in a sitar, some reverb, and a little backward guitar and you can almost guarantee that i'll like it. this cd has all that and more.
unfortunately, it also retains the same basic flaw that i find in the isness: the singing is not great and there are some pretty cheesy lyrics. i saw an interview with the singer and he acknowledges that his voice is lacking, but feels the prerogative of artistic expression warrants his singing anyway. i disagree. mozart and bach did not insist on singing the vocal parts of their masterpieces but instead gave their compositions to those trained in the art. i think amorphous androgynous's expression would be all the more powerful if they hired one of the thousands of out-of-work vocalists with talent to make what they have written beautiful. but they're not asking me, are they?
so, beware tracks 8 through 10 ("high and dry", "yes my brother...", and "in the summertime of consciousness") - the singing is grating on the ears and the lyrics (especially in that last one) unpleasantly cliché. after listening to them once, forcing myself to be open-minded and listening a second time, i gave up and just skip the tracks now.
so why is this my choice for november? because the rest of the cd is fabulous. it's so good to my ears that i can forgive (though I still lament) the 15 minutes or so wasted on those three tracks. i suppose i'm hard on the places the music falls short because it is so disappointing. the rest is so good that i can't help my greed — i don't want to give up three tracks. i want every second to sound like the rest of the cd tells me it could.
