Over a Casio drum beat and slow Coldplay piano chords, we hear the breathy spoken words:
“The seals are broken, the water is leaking in. All hope is falling into the well of despair”.
It’s possibly one of the most ill advised musical creations I’ve ever come across. And that’s before we get to the falsetto chorus.
SOMEWHERE IN THE OCEAN, the centrepiece of EXIT 451’s debut album is an inexcusable mess. It’s not a track you merely want to skip. You want to track down every person responsible and weep into their faces. Surly at some point someone must have had their reservations about this atrocity. But no, somehow the musical equivalent of a fart in a lift is now available on all major digital platforms in more than 240 countries world wide.
Rising from the ashes of Montreal’s nineties underground heroes Imaginary Steps, Exit 451 dealt with excessive management difficulties before opening their own studio and hiring Mark Howard (Bob Dylan, Marianne Faithfull, Tom Waits) to capture this ten track album. But instead of a band giddy at the prospect of finally realising their artistic vision, the end result is excruciatingly laboured.
Due to the lengthy gestation process, it feels as if every decision has been debated to the point of dull insanity. This is a band that clearly have a lot of confidence in what they do (how else could you come up with lyrics as preposterous as “I am the only one they call freedom”), but somewhere they lost the ability to judge whether a song was good enough.
Vocalist JP Alepins punctuates most of his melodic lines with dramatic pauses. As well as bludgeoning any momentum out the song, the lyrics reveal themselves at an infuriatingly slow pace. By the time he finishes a line, you’ve forgotten how it started. Without the aid of a lyric sheet, it’s impossible to grasp what any of these songs are actually about.
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He’d probably get away with it if the arrangements were interesting. Unfortunately, although every track is built with enough craft to reveal new details with each listen, the sparseness of the musicianship means that more often than not, the songs fall flat. The indefensible muddy production could be the worst offender. While it helps the spooky opener YOU EXIST (a song that could almost sit on Doves’ first record with a bit more focus), the trip-hop shuffle of MORNING STAR lacks any sense of definition or purpose. When the band try to inject some spirit into the album with the London Calling parody MY MELODY, it sounds like your listening to a portable radio behind double glazing. For a band that tries to deliver a U2 shaped chorus, it seems unfair that production is constantly forcing them elsewhere.
But then again, with nearly twenty years experience in the music industry you’d hope EXIT 451 would know what they were doing by now. And with inclusion of the laughable SOMEWHERE IN THE OCEAN, despite the album’s constant variety, the overall impression is of a band a bit too comfortable in their own skin to produce anything truly memorable.
Exit 451 on MySpace
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