Blue October - Foiled (Universal / Motown)
2/5
By: Christiana Spens
If you want to imagine what it might be like to go to group therapy, then 'Foiled' will give you the voyeurism with a soundtrack. Then again, if you're a big fan of this masochism, maybe you should be in therapy yourself. Ever thought of that?
There are points in the album where it sounds like a confession tape stolen from Melancholics Anonymous - more like music for the sake of therapy, than for the sake of music. The lyricist, Justin Furstenfeld, diarises a Texan life of neurosis, pills and trips to the shrink. But after a while, the fear and self-loathing line gets dull. Even at his most masochistic (in their debut single, 'Hate Me' for example), it's self-indulgent. In that particular song he tells his mother to hate him and get her life back, using her real voice-mail as stimulus - but it's obvious that his mother wouldn't leave him from her voice on the track: warm, caring, and telling him sweetly to take his medication. His mother loves him. And he's just another rebel without a cause.
Having said that, there's a Jekyll to Mr. Hyde.
The music succeeds in expressing expanse and liberation in reaction to the tight tension built in the lyrics, perhaps influenced by the Texan landscape that back drops the despair. "So I'll drive so fucking far away that I'll never cross your mind," he sings in 'Hate Me' - and the psychological desire to escape into the physical landscape is an acoustic escape as well.
With some of the mellow instrumental streams, the band paints a kind of landscape that distracts from the figure in its centre. With that, I had a sense of driving further away from the cockroaches, heat, inferno he sings of - in a 'Fear and Loathing' kind of rush - towards blood red sunsets and hot desert sand airborne with the drive, and a little chink of blue ocean in the distance.
There's something pretty bi-polar about the album, though: one moment mellow and lost in quietude, another moment manic depressive all over again. Something is missing: some image more than a beat-up Mustang beating dirt off the road as it drives further away. I want to know where it goes, and I want it to pick up some other influence on the way, because at this rate the road-trip Blue October are riding is driving headlong into Nickleback, Linkin Park and Papa Roach Land, singing 'Drilled a Wire Through My Cheek'.
It's very Dirty South, has all the beat-up angst of a number of bands in Texas, Georgia, Mississippi, and Tennessee - the hot sweat and violence of a land-locked summer and white trash bitterness and filth. It's all extremes and angst, masochism and anger versus naοve day-dreams and lullabies that for a moment you believe in, but only to see them as mere pipe dreams a second later as the chorus of mania returns.
After a while of listening to this, which feels like a bumpy road-trip from the beginning, it is more like a long journey you just want to end, than a great escape. "Are we there yet?" - On this record, we're never there yet. We're just taken on a relentless journey into a disturbed psyche. There are occasional moments of clarity. There are a few shots. But the trip never ends.
I once knew a guy in Memphis pretty well, who played in a band by night and worked in a mental hospital by day. He told me stories about the insane people. Some of them got better and got out; most of them didn't. They just kept trying to escape their own neurosis, but drove further into it. Listening to this record lets you know what an endless schedule of group therapies not going anywhere might feel like. In that sense, it is honest, accurate and informative. It is also pretty tragic.
It's a kind of therapy if that's what you want from music. Personally, I'd rather dance the pain away than lie melancholy on a shrink's couch, I'd rather play music for the sake of music, and live by a philosophy I once saw on a postcard: rehab is for quitters.
Your Feedback
Login to post your comment