Pretentious and gloomy is generally right up my cul de sac.
The Paperchase – Some Day This Could All Be Yours Vol.1
http://www.thepaperchaseband.com/
A concept album this, each track being subtitled with a different natural disaster, such as The Extinction, The Epidemic or The Flood. It seems head Paperchaser John Congleton is trying to outdo Hail to the Thief era Radiohead in the pretentious use of parenthesis and in exploring existential misery. Indeed the extent of this pretentiousness is shown by the last track We Have Ways of Making You Talk which is sub- titled The Human Condition.
Congleton’s wavering histrionic vocalising marries well to the off-kilter dissonance in the music. This befits the dark subject matter and the whole thing has a paranoid , claustrophobic feel to it. The album is enhanced by cleverly used film and field samples which rather than disrupt the flow, are placed in such a way as to allow the tracks to segue into a seamless whole. These add to the dissonant textures and give the thing the feel of a horror movie.
Pretentious and gloomy is generally right up my cul de sac. However, en masse, the tracks contained herein somewhat pall. The work kicks off in impressive mode with If Nobody Moves, Nobody Will Get hurt (The Extinction) being the type of thing that reviewers often call cinematic. Elsewhere they almost manage to become catchy on Your Money Or Your Life (The Comet) . The problem is that for the variety of textures and sounds they employ the album as a whole sounds samey. You could place the ten tracks in pretty much any order and not disrupt or alter the flow of the album to any great extent.
The ‘volume one’ in the title is as portentous as anything actually on the record, signalling as it does a second album of the same stripe sometime next year.
Words: Rover