Con Dolore
This Sad Movie  (Clairecords)
by Marc Hirsh

originally published in Space City Rock, Fall 2002

Con Dolore thinks This Sad Movie tells a story; the liner notes list the band members under “Cast,” the tracks tend to bleed together without so much as a pause and there’s a series of photos in the insert that clearly delineate a plot (or the progression of a scene, at the very least). That’s too bad, since such cinematic pretensions serve merely as distractions for a band whose best ideas demand a focus that they can’t, or won’t, muster for very long. The songs that don’t meander past the breaking point reprise unnecessarily (“Fractions of a Second 1” is nothing more than a continuation of “All Our Favorite Cats,” which doesn’t need one) or dissolve into awfully incidental music that perhaps fits into some grander, failed scheme but does nothing for the track at hand.

Which is a shame, because for the first few songs at least, Con Dolore creates a reasonably affecting mood of swelling sadness. Sounding like a cross between a European auto commercial and the bands that used to play the Bronze during the high school seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (with a dab of My Bloody Valentine-esque noise-as-melancholy-oppression thrown in for good measure), the band processes everything at their disposal, from the guitars and keyboards to the loop-like drums and the vocals of Kristy Moss, who, along with guitarist Ed Ballinger, doesn’t sing so much as whisper melodically. The resulting denseness is too oppressive to last, and as the album elapses, my interest shifts into an entirely passive mode, so that when it’s over, I’m ready for it to be over. Too long and with too many ideas by half, This Sad Movie runs out of steam well before the credits start to roll.

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