Buffalo - The Phoenix Foundation

Track list:

1. Eventually
2. Buffalo
3. Flock of Hearts
4. Pot
5. Bitte Bitte
6. Skeleton
7. Orange & Mango
8. Bailey's Beach
9. Wonton
10. Golden Ship

Running time: 42 minutes
Released: 2011

A favourite now. I remember getting this when it came out in the UK - I think some time after it had been out in their native New Zealand (yes, I am using Kiwi as the nationality tag). I don't recall what prompted me to get it because whilst I had heard of The Phoenix Foundation, and already had Horsepower (and/or Pegasus, I'm not sure which) I hadn't been that impressed with what I had heard. I am very glad I did though; Buffalo was one of my favourite releases from 2011, and it led me to a great gig and several more TPF albums.

Eventually starts with a mellow spacey introduction, a detached-sounding voice joining it. It's a low-key opener. Despite being on holiday I have not had a chance to do any of this for the past week, spending time swimming and eating at beachfront tavernas instead and trying to put thoughts of the horror of Brexit out of my mind to mixed success. My vacation has but a few days left to run, and I am now back with stable internet and more free time for the remainder to enjoy things like music. The tones here remain other-worldly, echo-y, throughout. It's music to relax to, gentle swells, like the waves around Naxos where I passed the week. I do think that, perhaps, it runs a little long. Whilst lush, the tune doesn't have that much in the way of engagement to it to justify the 5+ minute length.

The title track is, thankfully, a little more peppy, with a nice simple riff and a higher tempo. The vocal still carries elements of echoing harmonics, a reference point against the preceding number, but the track as a whole has a very different feel. It is fun, but nonsense. Buffalo in the ocean... what? In general I would prefer more meaningful lyrics rather than any old gubbins put up to make the right line structure or fit to the chords already committed. I hadn't realised this before but the album cover hints at this whacky idea.

I think the core of the album is the next few tracks. Flock of Hearts is a gentle roll, a sort of super-laid back tune that actually manages an effortless cool in a way that Jack Johnson just failed to for me. There is just a little more richness in the sound without being overwhelming - little riffs or sections that lift it, and more interplay between the elements. The star turn though is Pot. This song just kills it, a really catchy base structure and then a sublime harmonised vocal. The way the layers sit over and under each other is just perfect. I can't really hear the intricacies fully here - or at least, the experience is a little dulled compared to when I first heard it - but when the wandering electronics come in as an in-between line it takes off, the three elements setting each other off perfectly. It also closes before you get bored of the gorgeous harmony and start wanting something more substantial. A glorious number.

Catchy rhythm is the basis for Bitte Bitte. Its not rocket science, its not the most accomplished songwriting, but it is effective. Tempo, structure, and variation. The lyrics are a play on words (one that doesn't really work too well for me), and veer into nonsense more than I would like, but they fit the crucible they are offered well enough. I am less a fan of how the song concludes though, ooh-oohing its way out. There is a change of tone and feel for Skeleton; it's a little janky and spooky, but the vocal floats out nicely over the wind-effect. The chorus is a little bleak (burning bodies in the fields); this is not a carefree track. I rather like the tonal contrast with what has come before - and what follows; that light and dark, off and on, yin and yang. Too much of the same thing gets dull.

What comes next is light and silly. Orange & Mango is happy and clappy, a bop-along feelgood tune despite - again - utterly weird and nonsense lyrics. The chorus ("It takes two to tango, like an orange and a mango") is infectious and its hard to be too churlish about the words on this project when I can only report on them because I know them ahead of the listen. This track - like the album as a whole, and probably like The Phoenix Foundation's overall portfolio - is a mood piece.

Painting emotions with music rather than writing killer songs; there is certainly a place for this approach.

We come down again now, lower key, slower tempo. Almost soporific, but relaxingly so rather than boringly. Its a calm little drift on a gentle current. Little blooms in the music functioning as localised currents in a stream, adjusting the flow and direction. Like watching water run and swirl, it's easy to get carried along, submitting to the low-care nature. I have never met an up-tight Kiwi; whilst there must be some, a natural and easy-going approach seems to be a national trait.

Wonton raises the tempo a little, but only enough to trap you in a faster flowing stream which will soothe and carry you to relaxation as much as the slower numbers. I find myself trapped in the main riff, excluding the trills this time. The natural cadence of these tunes is perfectly judged. They is no forcing anything, they flow, they sway, they just are.  The final number has a lusher sound; the vocal is detached again, as has been a common thread on this work, but the overall feel to Golden Ship is very different from Eventually despite sharing these traits. There is more purpose here, a stronger driving force behind the drum and guitar base that the spacier sounds absorb and surround. It's not a quick piece by any means but it is a more directed one. The opening tune was free to drift, this moves with purpose.

There are many, many holes in this album that actual music critics would probably fall over themselves to poke through, but for me it just works. The rich, lush, layered sounds entice and entwine me, and make the album as a whole a very comforting and familiar friend. Pot, though, stands head and shoulders above any other tune here; it is just a wonderful 3 and a half minutes that I wish I could share with more people. Oh, wait; I don't normally do this, but:

Video is weird as hell, mind.

Brushfire Fairytales - Jack Johnson

Track list:

1. Inaudible Melodies
2. Middle Man
3. Posters
4. Sexy Plexi
5. Flake
6. Bubble Toes
7. Fortunate Fool
8. The News
9. Drink the Water
10. Mudfootball (For Moe Lerner)
11. F-Stop Blues
12. Losing Hope
13. It s All Understood
14. Flake (live)
15. Inaudible Melodies (live)

Running time: 53 minutes
Released: 2001

OK so. This takes me back. Not quite to 2001 as I came to it later than that. In 2002-2003 I found myself in an inadvisable situation which, amongst other things, exposed me to Jack Johnson. For whatever reason I picked up this, and On and On, so my first impressions must have been good. However since then he's pretty much been an auto-skip. Forcing myself to listen (and because I have the British version, I get two bonus live renditions; woo!) is a good way to confront the biases I may have built up.

I have been quiet here of late, and this post is overdue. Busy as the weeks are, a long weekend would normally have offered me the opportunity to make up for no evening posts, but a combination of a 6 1/2 hours of driving (plus knock on tiredness) and my antipathy for this particular listen put paid to that. Still, here I am to buck it up. There is a lazy feel to the opening guitar line, an almost smug laziness in fact. It's as if it thinks it is so cool it doesn't have to try, so doesn't. I can't tell if I hate it or secretly admire it. So empty and yet...

It feels a little like a busker on the street, tapping into something done by someone else, not quite delivering but giving you enough to recognise the quality of the source material. Here I find myself bouncing off Johnson's voice rather hard, but finding an affinity for the slow sway of the tempo. So, a nice clean and clear opening then.

Middle Man is immediately less interesting. More standard in its construction, i.e. a little busier, and higher of pace, it doesn't have the easy rhythm of Inaudible Melodies, the magical timing and that sense of self importance. That quality is repugnant, but it often exists because there is something else special that leads one to believe in it. Posters tries to recapture it, but ends up feeling very, very dull. This does try to rebottle the playing from the first tune, but falls into a structure that has less room for it. I am still bouncing off the voice, too, which has a more important role in this track, rendering the guitar to a sideshow. I can see why people liked this a lot, but each track seems to erode my patience with it further. It is like an amalgam of several different artists, stealing little tricks from several different places - Sexy Plexi brings to mind 4 or 5 other musicians or groups in turn. It feels ripped off, or like a homage to something, rather than its own thing.

Short week this week - not only was there a bank holiday on Monday, I'm off on Friday too, going to the UK Games Expo. Then hosting friends on Saturday. I'll need to flop on Sunday, for sure. It's also been an odd week - finding my TV aerial broke piled another thing to do on top of booking a dental appointment and the thing I find myself forgetting every bloody day... to get on to someone about fixing my boundary fencing. I am utterly incapable of getting that sorted out; at a time when calling would be possible I put it down as something I must do, then promptly forget until a time like now - an evening when calling a tradesman isn't on. Argh!

Ugh. Bubble Toes. Stupid goddamn nonsense. The insouciance that is the predominant theme conveyed by Johnson's style has been growing more irritating with every track since the first, but when met with wordless choruses it reaches a zenith of annoyance. This song is just awful, and yet a centrepiece. Thankfully all of these tracks are quick, past and gone in short order - not because they are actually that short (Bubble Toes is just shy 4 minutes), but because they are easily tuned out.

The next track actually recaptures a bit of the style and swagger that put me on the fence about Inaudible Melodies. Whilst this, like the tracks before, is based on simple looping guitar hooks, it has the right spacing. The timing of the switch from one riff to another, the overall tempo. An easy sway. It makes things accessible but also generates that feeling of effortlessness. I guess it is impossible to not connect the form of his music with Johnson's surfer background. It has that stoner / dropout ease to it, the low key tone that you imagine just sitting on a beach after dark around a fire pit with friends might bring. It permeates, overloads and beats down any attempt to really get invested. It's all too laid back. I have to be fair and call out what I like, too; the edge to the sound on Drink the Water - provided by the bass part - makes this track more interesting, at least for the first 30 seconds or so. After that point you have basically heard the whole thing. I am far from done with this listen yet, but I feel the same for the album - a taster is more than enough to know what the whole thing is like.

I am getting no enjoyment. A sense of distance instead. I am inured now to the bits I don't like, and there is so little left once they are removed. It is just... bland. I think that very blandness was possibly the root of his success. Not offending the maximum number of people, and getting picked up through familiarity. What is distinctive as a one-off is utterly samey in quantity - that sense of style that makes Jack Johnson tunes very recognisable becomes a formula stuck to so rigidly that if you've heard one you've heard them all. Sure, there's some variation in pace between tunes, but the compositions barely shift. Of course, as I say that we get a track that has a different base - much more weight on the percussion come Losing Hope; the elements here are all the same though, it's just the weightings that changed slightly. It was a surprise at start, but it falls into the same repetitive patterns as prior tracks pretty fast.

There is no question that Johnson has something; his style is a real asset, if you like that sort of thing. I find myself not liking it, and cursing my younger self for buying into it based on association with what brought him to my consciousness in the first place. Whilst I freely admit I am a lazy so-and-so, the ultra-laid back "aren't I cool" sense I get from JJ's vocals and the predominant tempo of his works set my teeth on edge a bit. I was never "cool"; I never will be. I'm happy in my nerdiness, which makes a self-satisfied sounding dude like Johnson anathema to me. I am into the two live tracks now; the screaming of the crowd is so out of place with the over-relaxed nature of the tunes. They're so sedate that whilst I can see (and vehemently disagree with) the reasons people like this stuff, I can't for the life of me how anyone gets into it enough to vocalise, be it scream or cheer, in response to it. Its very nature is low key, not hype.

This is a clear out. The second bonus track is a version of Inaudible Melodies and, hearing it again after being exposed to almost an hour of Johnson with nothing else in between, it has lost its swagger and with it any appeal.  The crowd of screaming fans really doesn't help there, but mostly its my fatigue. Yes - this could be a case of confirmation bias, but frankly I don't care. Good riddance surfer-dude.