Before I look at any information about an artist or the album I'm reviewing, I listen to the entire thing first. I did this with A Pleasant Fiction, the 2004 release from Percy Howard, and then I looked him up on his website and on Google expecting to find people like me who didn't quite understand or particularly enjoy the album. Instead, I was greeted by rave review after rave review.
I sat, confused, wondering if I had listened to the wrong CD, or if I was just a complete idiot with no musical taste. Then I looked closer at the others reviewing the album and found that they were all jazz specialists, and I realized that I'm not an idiot – I'm just an average listener, and that this album, targeted towards jazz listeners, is just kind of weird to me.
But the mark of an exceptional album is one that makes you, as a non-fan of the genre, want to listen anyway. A Pleasant Fiction does not do this. “The Girl on the Back of the Motorcycle”, the album's opener, just made me uncomfortable, and not because I'm a prude, but because it's weird and the woman talking says things like “passion, wet....I peer into the hole to see what's left of you” and so on. The rest of the songs didn't make me feel any more comfortable, either.
Most of the songs consist or music that, if played in a genre more like whatever you call Of Montreal or MGMT, would be good, or at least interesting. It's largely just noise and computerized sounds. The vocals are never really vocals but instead hollering, moaning, or groaning, and they lose the lyrics so much that you won't be able to hear them at all.
Basically, if you like Howard's other releases or you're one of the two per cent of people in the world who like this particular section of the jazz genre, you'll love this album. If you're part of the 98 per cent of people who don't, you'll be left feeling weird and confused.
July 3, 2010
