Anathallo, Floating World

There’s a certain flea market quality to the instrumentation / configuration on Anathallo’s debut, a little bit of everything laid out in cardboard boxes. A far-from-inclusive list would still have to include glockenspiel, bleacher stomp, well-miked children’s bikes, strings, odd (yet sincere) choral harmonies, (unintentional) polysyllabic humor, distortion, hand-claps, vocal soaring, pidgin English, a rhythm section veering from straight-ahead competence to I’m-in-a kitchen-and-I’m-going-to-smash-everything art-rock, baseball cards, mouthful song titles (“Genessaret Going Out Over 30000 Fathoms of Water”), Japanese stories about dogs, horns of all sorts, all known species, possibly even some mounted, garage-hung antlers…just, really, a whole lot of gorgeous debris but all of it, admittedly, informed by the sort of easy yet heartfelt spirituality that you really want to respect but basically don’t.

This impression (of said spirituality being somehow cheap and the resentment you feel towards it for making you think so and for making you feel not sophisticated but jaded for thinking so) is something whole books could be written about and without really saying or concluding much. Suffice it to say that the casual listener’s relationship with the artist’s relationship to God and/or overall, non-specific spirituality is uneasy at best. But this, in and of itself, is hardly an album killer. It can be resolved or, more easily, ignored. What can’t be ignored, however: despite the garage sale everything-for-5-cents list of instruments and modes, there’s nothing small, familiar, or offputtingly clever about this record. Where one expects the musical equivalent of curio or knickknack, one instead encounters grandeur, vapid, and intent-ridden. The album is, in a word, overwrought. It’s also, even if only momentarily, beautiful.

Frustratingly beautiful. That’s the crux of it. The record is unsatisfying not because it doesn’t deliver but because it occasionally does, offering up intimate, lovely kitsch and then, as promptly, abandoning it altogether. You’re never seduced but you are interested, then disappointed, in quick succession. Perhaps it’s inevitable — the band (which is, by the way, closer to a swarm in number) samples too many genres, too many sounds, too many ideas. Occasionally (perhaps inevitably) they get it right but just as often, they flat out don’t. Funky, herky-jerk folk segues into needlessly showy instrumentation; intimate yet catchy murmuring grabs your attention, then fades, replaced by glassy ornamentation.

Lyrically, Floating World (which presumably refers to Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, An Artist of the Floating World?) ranges from wooden half-talk (“I dug, pulling out the bites of snakes / And slugs and bugs”) to semiotic nightmare (“Where I can be the signifier / Not that which is signified / The referent convincing us (you and me both) / For you smile my is like bow, bow, bow, bow”). On the other hand, this is music you hear instead of decipher; bad as those examples may here appear, they’re exquisitely choreographed on the record. The harmonies, though cloying at times, are both celestial and acrobatic. Sonic, very.

But hit or miss is the modus operandi for this Michigan outfit. At their best Anathallo sounds like fellow faith-rocker Sufjan Stevens, but at their worst they sound like a New Wave version of the Polyphonic Spree that’s somehow lost its sense of humor. For every minute of hey-this-sounds-like-potently-new, there are several where you find yourself not so much bored as uncomfortable, feeling parental responsibility for a bunch of talented but whacked-out kids wearing gowns. They are reportedly an amazing live act, one where the contradictions of their music are musically discussed, worked through, etc., the net effect being that this reviewer’s frustration with the record itself has only increased.

Anathallo, in Greek, means “to renew or to make bloom again.” Ignoring the whole OMG factor of such a name, it makes a certain additional criticism available to yours truly. The band, genuinely talented and apparently nice in a totally non-threatening way, try too hard to live up to their name. They try to make it new and that’s of course a fun, wholesome grad-school goal. It’s just that sometimes the best way of achieving that goal is to recycle, to reuse, to restate in a newly giving way. Viz. sometimes the best way to write a good rock song isn’t to overthink/implement said overthinking in a truly pyrotechnic, structural way. The best way to write a good rock song is to write a good rock song. Period.