The Bottom Line
- Unique and epic ska-carnival sound
- Bold transitions between sections of songs
- Features fun instruments rarely heard in pop music
- Sometimes too many instruments spoil the song
- Fine line between experimental and jumbled/unlistenable
Description
- Ska-tinged "History" is like the Mighty Mighty Bosstones on acid with a little injection of quasi-Irish bluegrass.
- "Dirty Keys" has a majestic, horn-heavy intro that gets backed up by keyboard and segues into grungy horns.
- "Tommy Bones" starts with a funky groove that breaks up into intermittent slowdowns paired with melodic horns.
Guide Review - Darla Farmer "Rewiring the Electric Forest"-- Album Review
One of the dark, ska-tinged songs on Darla Farmer's debut album, Rewiring the Electric Forest, is called "The Cow That Drank Too Much." Perhaps this should have been the album's title, since much of the record sounds like a drunken cow: loud, lonesome, and utterly confused. The band tries all sorts of cute, quirky tricks to keep its songs varied, and while variation certainly results, it tends more toward the unsettlingly schizophrenic than the easily enjoyable.
As soon as Darla Farmer gives you a sweet beat to tap your toes to, the band takes it away and offers an extreme change of tempo, a disjointed mumble of instruments, or a bunch of shouting in its place. This makes it difficult to really get "into" any of the songs or the album as a whole: just when you’re starting to have fun, everything changes. In keeping with the party metaphor above, it's like your ex keeps popping up in a corner, making out with your best friend. How are you supposed to react? Darla Farmer, it seems, would respond to the unexpected with the unexpected--by kissing a stranger, perhaps.
"The Strangler Fig" has one of the most compelling beginnings of any song released this year, with gentle strings and muted horns conveying a truly melancholy mood. Mournful vocals top the music beautifully. Sadly, everything soon busts out into a jumble of unnecessary horns. The problem isn't that the two sections of the song are so different, the problem is it's not clear why they're so different. What’s the motivation for breaking up such beauty?
Darla Farmer could stand to follow the old axiom: just because you can, doesn't mean you should. Toning it down a little and learning to go with the flow--and the band often achieves good flow, only to abandon it entirely--would vastly improve the band's intermittently enjoyable sound and lend some much-needed consistency to the music.