The Secret Show - Impressionist Road Map of the West (Atlantic)
1/5
By: Kevin Molloy
"Matthew Davies, lead vocalist of Funeral for a Friend, explores new avenues of creativity in his new side project, 'The Secret Show'." I start by quoting the PR release both in order to fill you in on a couple of important informational points, and also to avoid the first sentence being as critically damning as the rest of this article promises to be. It's just not cathartic to start and end on a negative note.
So, let's start at the beginning. 'Lover' is the closest (not very close) to Funeral For A Friend that this album leans, with its whirling guitar parts and punchy (for country music) attack. It's also the best track, and the album opener. It's a good tactic to lead an LP with a strong track, but it's not enough to then follow up with dross.
And dross the second track is: shared vocal between Davies and his female partner sets a format used on a number of tracks later on too: slow, countrified, perfectly executed middle of the road twee-ness. The Dixie Chicks wouldn't sniff at it. And, as a not-so-aside, nobody needs to hear a chorus line fifty times straight before fade. If it was a good line it'd be bad enough, but "where did it go so wrong in this life" needs a little work to become an insightful piece of pentameter.
And alas, you'll struggle to remember a single song even after a good few, painful listens. 'Mañana' maybe provides a rare moment of middling interest, something like a Ryan Adams b-side, but the truth is that this LP would never have seen the light without Davies' previous FFaF fame...it'd still be stuck on the open mic circuit. Admittedly it'd be the best on the circuit, it's pleasant enough, there'd be a bit of low-level backslapping and success, but there wouldn't be a major release.
So don't let the names and titles fool you: there's a lot of mistitling going on in The Secret Show. Nothing was really worthy of the production effort it's received, and the album's certainly not worthy of such a pompous title. Impressionist? These brush strokes are too broad even for that. In truly unambiguous advisory tone, these lyrics and emotions aren't developed enough to wash with an acoustic guitar, and the songs themselves are nothing more than hollow timber with pretty instrumental wallpaper, and no foundations. The pomp and simplicity need to be taken back to FFaF, where even if we weren't meant to smile at the ridiculousness, we could at least rock out, and these songs might sound as if they were in earnest rather than a well worn clutch of clichés.
Artists in this article: The Secret Show
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