CD Review: The Dimes
The King Can Drink the Harbor Dry (Pet Marmoset Records)
[ANTIQUE POP] Dimes, can you spare a brother? Spare me your tedious mid-tempo strumming, wan melodies, sedate vocals, and especially, your humorless lyrical gloss on a CliffsNotes summary of a high-school American history textbook. Yes, your sophomore release, The King Can Drink the Harbor Dry, sure sounds pretty at first, with its tastefully restrained acoustic arrangements and careful harmonies—but it doesn’t take too many similar-sounding songs for those qualities to become liabilities.
And I had to get out my spyglass—sorry, magnifying glass—to parse your lyrics’ utterly illegible, faux-Colonial typeface. (Note: 18th-century calligraphers did not have 8-point fonts.) But by rights, they should come with ye olde Wikipedia links; songs address Winslow Homer, Clara Barton, Susan B. Anthony (“Susan be”—get it?—“good to me”) and a numbing array of others. One tune, “Walden and the Willow Tree,” ticks off Alexander Graham Bell, Poe, Thoreau, the Salem witch trials and Elias fucking Howe in just 11 lines. Sorry, guys, but if you’re not playing that for laughs, you’re gonna get ’em anyway. The pretentious cherries atop the liner notes are thank-yous—in an even tinier font, thank you—to a laundry list of historical figures.
We’ve heard this history-geek indie-folk before, but Johnny Clay’s songs lack the mordant wit, eccentric diction and high-wire rhymes of Colin Meloy’s evocations of antiquity. It’s commendable that the Dimes choose to apply their undeniably lovely sound to lyrical matter so far removed from the usual chamber-folk navel-gaze. But this album conjures history as seen through a hazy nostalgic squint, lacking the grit and spontaneity of real, lived experience. Truth be told, several songs sound less like folk-rooted ballads than mid-’80s Alan Parsons Project radio hits. If our predecessors had been this wussy, we never would’ve made it out of the 1700s.
SEE IT: The Dimes play Mississippi Studios twice on Saturday, Nov. 14. With Po’ Girl (7:30 pm, all ages) and with Casey Neill & the Norway Rats and Friday Mile (10 pm, 21+). $10 for each show.
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- The Dimes, “Lovely Mary Dyer,” The King Can Drink The Harbor Dry (Self-released) Mary Dyer
- The Dimes Dress Up for the Penny Jam In the lat
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Inger
says:Really?
You’re given an opportunity to talk about their harmonies, the collaborative efforts, and their place in the renewed oral tradition, and you talk about their font? Really? I can’t believe WW wasted the paper real estate on your review.
Okay, so you don’t like the font. It makes you squint. And you don’t like that the lyrics made you go look up the stories of the names they dropped instead of having them spelled out for you in iambic pentameter. And you don’t like that none of them were actually in the Colonial War, or that the lyrics are more Beatles than Bukowski. That’s cool. But don’t expect the rest of us to condemn a band for taking subject matter that had previously looked cold and dead on a history book page and turning it into something that feels alive, sounds catchy, and piques the listeners’ curiosity, perhaps even to the point of Wikiing it themselves.
By the way, Mississippi Studios was packed for both shows yesterday. Look at all those morons who love that tiny font.
Posted @ November 15th, 2009 at 9:00 am (November 11th, 2009) | Flag this Comment | permalink