The title ‘Film Noir’ is evocative and connotive of vintage Hollywood crime flicks of the sort that represented the hard-boiled fiction. The terms suggests certain yet specific stylistic tropes within both the narrative and the cinematography. In recent years, the term has come to have been dropped in referentially hither and thither by musical acts as divers as you’d care to name, and fair play: the postmodern melting pot that is contemporary culture renders everything ripe for plunderage and referencing, quotation and absorption.
Owen Franklin’s EP simply doesn’t do its title justice. For a start, it’s just too chirpy and overly decorative. ‘You’re trying too hard’, he sings in the chorus of the opener, ‘Danse Macabre’. It’s rather apposite, for while Owen is indubitably an adept musician and a clever lyricist, his compositions are so obviously from the ‘I’m smart, me, listen to how witty I am’ school of songwriting that elicits respect rather than pleasure. This is nowhere more evident than on the slightly awkward ‘Teetotal’ which recounts a bad hangover tale in a somewhat mannered fashion. There’s a self-consciousness about it that presents something of an obstacle to enjoyment.
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Owen Franklin Online
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