Artistic debt is one thing. The rip-off is another. And, as the
rock-journalistika, you've gotta be cautious when casting the judgment
of one or the other. As example of scene one, Blonde Redhead,
Broadcast, and Songs:Ohia all began life not only borrowing heavily
from, respectively, Sonic Youth, Stereolab, and Will Oldham, but had
their debut discs released by those very same bands (via Smells Like
Records, Super Duophonic, and Palace Records, respectively). Anyone
who, from such, denounced any of those debutantes as mere rip-offs
would've been eating some of the humblest crow over the past
best-part-of-a-decade as all of the above issued amazing albums after
amazing albums. So, then, hearing the various Bright Eyes acolytes of
recent days, this pen has had to sketch carefully in portraying them,
wanting to depict Jason Anderson and/or Son, Ambulance as humans drawing
heavily from their friend Conor Oberst, without coloring them as cheap
knockoffs. One need not exercise any such care when writing about An
Angle, the most shameless, complete and utter Bright Eyes rip-off I've
ever heard. This means that, in the most mechanical terms, this is a
well-played and well-recorded disc that serves its own artistic purposes
— acousticky strums, prolix lyrics, angsty sentiments — well enough.
But, yet, at the same time, it's so hideously derivative that it's close
to unlistenable. An Angle leader Kris Anaya spends the entirety of this
56-minute compact disc pretending to be someone else; then, to make
things worse, he turns around and says "my approach is to be as real as I
can" like he means it. Anaya is, gallingly, that worst-case American,
one so in thrall to what other people do and say that he can't even
recognize his "own" thoughts are not really his own. On the centerpiece
of We Can Breathe Under Alcohol — a seven-and-a-half minute drunken
acoustic moaner called "Born in a Bottle" — Anaya just regurgitates so
many longtime/long-term staples of the Conor canon: that he drinks too
much, that he hates the indie music scene, that rock critics are doing
his head in. And he sings all of this, of course, in a voice that
parrots Oberst's physical voice — his accent, his pitch, his delivery,
his intonation — as much as it does his artistic voice.
|
