At a certain point, many veteran artists reach a point where their
latest works threaten to become overshadowed by their legacy. This is
generally less a problem in the indie realm than in the
nostalgia-heavy arena-rock world, but it still happens. And now, more
than 150 songs into his career, David Gedge — the driving force
behind the Wedding Present and, more recently, Cinerama — seems
to be struggling somewhat against the enormous burden of the past.
It's ironic, at least insofar as the Weddoes used to sell shirts that
proclaimed "All the Songs Sound the Same," but Cinerama's musical
diversity actually detracts from their latest album,
Torino.
Are they the chamber-pop act that the orchestral string-driven
"Airborne" suggests? The glossy, seasoned pros that perform midtempo
numbers like "Estrella" and "Close Up"? The Wedding Present tribute
band found on the straightforward rockers "Two Girls" and new single
"Careless"? Largely missing here is the jaw-dropping juxtaposition of
noisy guitars against gorgeous keyboards and strings that tickled the
ears so on the band's previous longplayer,
Disco Volante.
On the lyrical side, Gedge continues to expand his palette while
sticking to his primary subject: women and the events that transpire
when they're mixed up with men. "She charms me, she harms me, she
fights me, delights me/ She breaks me, she takes me, she eats me, she
defeats me," he sings in "Two Girls," poignantly acknowledging both
the sweet and the sour that love and lust can entail. As noted by the
band in a
press
release, the songs on
Torino find the narrator cheating on
someone three times, getting cheated on thrice, breaking up with
girlfriends a like number of times, and engaging in a pair of
one-night stands. The narratives have come a long way from the days
of cuckolded Weddoes tunes like "Unfaithful," and "My Favourite
Dress"; indeed, words like "breasts," "screwing," and "underwear"
casually roll off Gedge's tongue with scarcely a hint of
self-consciousness.
And yet something does seem a little unnatural, a bit contrived about
Gedge's lyrics, as if too often he is writing about films he has seen
and novels he has read rather than from his own experiences. Perhaps
this sense is triggered by his frequent lapses into the
aforementioned terminology; romantic souls tend to express themselves
through euphemisms and metaphors when talking about their own lives,
and save the straightforward, naturalistic descriptions for external
events. Thus the contrast between the line "You put your hand onto
the very place my girlfriend's hand should be" on first single
"Quick, Before It Melts" and the borderline-embarrassing language
("You tied my hands and whispered commands/ Then my whole body shook
as you began to suck/ I cried your name and then I came") found on
the bondage-tinged "Tie Me Up." "Tie" may in fact be the oddest track
Gedge has ever produced, opening as it does with a minute-long,
"cinematic" instrumental passage that wouldn't be out of place in a
Western, bringing to mind images of cowboys on the lonesome, dusty
trail.
I don't mean to suggest that this disc best serves as a beverage
coaster; some of the songs are in fact quite good. "Two Girls" and
"Careless" both elicit fond musical memories of Gedge's back catalog,
while "Quick, Before It Melts" plays to Cinerama's strengths,
blending sunny strings and gritty guitars. And, as I noted in a
previous Cinerama
review,
album closer "Health and Efficiency" is quite simply a gorgeous,
melancholy stunner. But the chaff-to-wheat ratio remains
distressingly unbalanced on
Torino.
