 |
Label: Nine Yards - Rating:
Indifference for Entirety - A review of Landy’s latest album ‘Eros and Omissions’
It’s a quiet night at home in downtown Los Angles. I’m at home sipping vino, when I slip into iTunes and peruse my options. Although I’m not sick of the thousands of choices right before me, I seem to be. I try something new. Double clicking on the first track of Landy’s latest ‘Eros and Omissions’ I walk over to the kitchen counter , in part of my eating-out-of-boredom ritual. The first track, ‘Just a Thought’ has started. It being the first track, is a prelude to the album, and an honest one. The vocals are a whiney, melancholic chant… “Love…….there is no love,” over and over, and this is how the album goes.
I stop ‘Just a Thought’ and listen to it again, it reminds me of something I can’t quite discern, maybe the children chanting gives me an essence of ‘The Wall,’ yet less eerie. I have stopped looking for food, I’m not hungry, mostly because I am preoccupied waiting for something to happen. The steady beat of the music almost like a heart ticking has left me expecting something…anything, to happen. The second track ‘Your Words Not Mine’ is ordered cacophony.It has the feeling of the first track, which after listening to the whole album has me in a realization that the every song has this “feeling.”
Maybe it isn’t a “feeling” but more of a “quirk”, either way every track after this follows with same “quirk” as an ingredient. Each song is the perfect addition to a soundtrack for a Wes Andersen movie, where the main character, in a melancholic state has a realization, good or bad. It doesn’t matter what the realization is.
The movie soundtrack feel ,may have a correlation considering the group fell into the hands of actor/director Adam Goldberg, known for roles in “Saving Private Ryan,” “The Hebrew Hammer,” and “ 2 Days in Paris.” According to LANDy’s Bio Letter , Goldberg began mixing tapes as early as 1990, then, his largest audience was his family. In 2002 he met Emma Kathan of The Black Pine, and as the bio says he became the fifth member of the band…or started a new one. Next he met Stephen Drozd of The Flaming Lips. Drozd composed music for 2005’s “I Love Your Work,” directed by Goldberg, and that’s how Landy began, somewhere between 2002 and 2005.
As I progress through album, I await a climax that never fully arrives. It partially arrives with the song “Day for Night.” This song is the most fun on the album, with of being at a carnival, you almost can dive in to it. I listen over the next few days, and I find myself growing detached and even alienated. There is no getting lost in this album, it is the opposite, the listener becomes more concoiously aware of every instrument and vocal, and it’s placement in the song. I find myself wondering if I can organize the music in my brain somehow. Each song has a beat that resonates like a countdown or the ticking of a clock, leaving the listener in a state of suspense that is never fulfilled.
‘Eros and Omissions’ is a thoughtful attempt at what the band calls “apology music”, but with little or no variation from song to song, it is difficult to listen to the album as whole. Maybe a mood of indifference would call for a session with the album in its entirety. Otherwise it’s safe to say that any three songs at random would accomplish what listening to the album would.
Like LANDy? Check out: Earlimart, Bill Callahan, Eels
