Fauxbois – Carry On
Fauxbois - Carry On
Lo-fi, downtempo, verging on minimalistic, no-one could ever accuse Fauxbois of overindulgence in either their instrumentation, their album’s production or even in what is their real strength, their songwriting. Assuming that a song such as “Start Of My Slip” is the work of Fauxbois’ founding member Bryan Mayer, who left New York for Idaho in the middle of the last decade, taking his Mayerforce One project with him, it’s apparent that his songwriting and arranging skills are every bit as focused and defined as they’ve ever been. I’ve often found myself considering that bands and musicians first recordings are probably their strongest and most durable work (partly as so many of the new albums I hear are precisely that), but Carry On has all the hallmarks of an album that’s taken more than one summer to bring to fruition. This is country music alright, but country in a gently pastoral sense that reflects the rhythms of the rural landscape rather than the dustbowl truckstop, and there’s an actual sense of studio invention at work on the thirteen tracks here. Songs that began life as weekend campfire strum-alongs are given some enervating treatments that stop well short of the kind of overproduced psychedelia that we’re all a little over familiar with, while losing none of their charm or even mystery.
But it’s the actual songwriting that makes Carry On an album that you would decide to keep when clearing out your MP3 player’s memory. “Start Of My Slip” shows a skill with wordplay based on repetition that is so obvious a literary device that I’m left wondering why it seems so freshly cultivated (and the vocals are entirely audible throughout the entire album). There is a definite skill in taking a repetitive lyric – each line beginning with the words ‘in the start …’ or ‘in the middle …’ and preventing the resultant song from sounding just a little too mannered or poetically overwritten but Fauxbois’ skill is in letting the acoustics take the weight of the concepts on display, and the gentle rhythms complement the near whispered duetted male/female vocal and without sounding as if they were even aware of a microphone in the room, Fauxbois turn in a deceptively effortless sounding performance.
Things aren’t always so uncomplicated though. The albums title track is a twisting math rock piece composed of a multiplicity of guitar parts and somehow slightly at odds with the less energetic moments that precede it, but this is only track three and with another ten songs yet to emerge it’s already apparent that Fauxbois are a creature of many aspects. “Teleportation” could’ve worked just as effectively in a mainly acoustic lo-fi setting, but the sudden addition of an array of guitar effects has the band posing more questions than they answer: is this folk rock combining with electronica or are things taking a turn for the more artcore experimentalist side of the equation? Add a bit more reverb and phasing and Fauxbois would put at least one foot over into Wayne Coyne’s world, but the combination of constantly altering guitar styles (which is done at every opportunity which the songs present) and the underlying discordancy that permeates the entire album makes the band impossible to second guess musically, with only the song tempos remaining constant. The relatively simplistic arrangement of “Let It Fall Down” is suddenly wrenched apart by a horn section which only appears on this song. “Ghosts And Fireflies” begins as a ballad, is interrupted by some sustain-heavy electrics and turns into the loudest song on the album. “Lost Heart Beats” starts off with a surf riff before crash landing somewhere near Brandon Flowers’ back garden, and final track “Watery Eyes” revisits the lyrical style of “Start Of My Slip”: ‘there’s power in things you’ll never say / there’s power in things you’ll never see’ and while it lacks some of the more inventive touches that characterise a lot of the other songs on Carry On it does show Fauxbois at their most structured and probably makes for an impressive finale to their live show.
Fauxbois present us with a collection of songs as erratic, heartfelt and downright eccentric as I expect I’ll hear for a while. They’re a bit all over the place, throwing in as many ideas as they could agree on and their artisanship ensures that their enthusiasms hold together over the entire length of the album, while the minimal production has a clarity that prevents their songs from getting lost in waves of phasing and reverb. Idiosyncratic and subtle, at times near overwhelming in its continuous invention, Carry On is an album that will require more than one listen to entirely appreciate its scope and depth.
