Foxygen – Hang (Jagjaguwar)

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All summer I’ve been tuned into Simon Morris and Phil O’Brien’s Matinee Idle, RNZ’s wonderfully eclectic music show featuring the quirky, personal over indulgences of two middle aged radio DJs who never had the courage to throw away their random collection of CDs and vinyl from the 1950’s – 1980’s.  It’s a challenging, cringe-worthy but often hilarious listen, featuring tunes you’d hoped had gone away for ever!  For the younger listeners, it’s a shocking revelation that not every song from the 1980s was made by Madonna and Spandau Ballet.  But it’s also most likely the backbone for most of the material on the new Foxygen album which to these aged ears hears a mashup of Bowie, Elvis Costello, Abba, Lou Reed, Nico, and Broadway.  Except, perhaps with the omission of Burton Cummings.   Foxygen’s particular approach is definitely new to my ears.  However, I’m thinking I might be a little late to the party.  Turns out the kids have been doing this historical blend thing for a while and this is their fourth album – although it’s touted as their first ‘proper album’ in their own publicity spin, as if everything before it didn’t matter.  It’s definitely the first with a full orchestra.

On their last, slightly less glamorous effort, …And Star Power vocalist, and one half of the Foxygen duo, Sam France cynically asked: “What are we good for if we can’t make it?”. That’s because at the time, the band was at the height of their their dysfunction. Reading back over their press, it seems they were destined to break up every week. The web is thick with accounts of onstage meltdowns and hissy-fits.  In a sense they’d become living versions of their own eccentric classic-rock pastiches.  Too clever, by half.  Making music was easy.  Working as a team was not.  ‘Together, Alone’ – to steal from Crowded House – appears to have been their modus operandi.  Actually alone became the eventual watch word, and before I’d even heard of them, they’d broken up, announcing their ‘Farewell Tour’ in 2015.  Bugger. They died before I even knew they’d lived.

But no.  It turns out it was all for nowt. I don’t know if it was some kind of fake-out or a cruel in-joke.  But given the crap year we’ve just had, what with all our heroes dying off, it’s no surprise that the world sometimes buys more of a band that no longer exists as much as one that’s still soldiering on.

Listening to their previous album …And Star Power (2014), it seems like a bit of a placeholder whilst the band’s goes through their big breakup and revival so that at last, after the bull dust has settled, they can finally get on with making the most extravagant, exuberant and lush album that they can make.  It’s a triumph that Sister Scissors, Elton John and Panic at The Disco could only dream of.

Moving from the bedroom to the studio to recording with a 40 plus piece orchestra Hang shows that all that went before was just the gambling rush before settling down to a proper investment of time, money and, obviously, patience.  To make music this good, you need to stick around.  Despite France continuing his penchant for impersonating Lou Reed, David Bowie, Elvis Costello, Peter Murphy, Freddie Mercury et al he, along with collaborator Jonathan Rado, has created the most brilliant, disciplined homage to the glam, theatre rock of the late ’70s.  In virtually every song you can hear the flavours of the most ostentatious works of Bowie, Mott The Hoople, Queen blended with and the Broadway drama of Billy Joel, Bonny Tyler, Meatloaf and Elton John.  Even KISS makes an appearance!  In a nutshell, it’s the Brill Building slums it in Tin Pan Alley on the way to a night out at The Whiskey and breakfast at Carnegie Hall.

Conducted and arranged by Trey Pollard with help Mathew E.White (Indie rock’s current go-to magician)  the orchestra is more than just a few strings added to a rhythm track. This is a ‘proper’ group and they’re at the very epicentre of every song coming on taller and bigger than IMAX and more sumptuous, more luscious than a box of Swiss chocolates at a s’mores bonfire roast off.  The gorgeous Philly soul strings of the opening number Follow The Leader starts us off with a delicious vibe that carries through to the Broadway feel on Avalon, a sort of tribute to Sunset Boulevard, with the oddest fade out, morphing ‘Avalon’ into “Babylon / ABBA-Lon”.  The brass chorus builds up in proper Tin Pan Alley style completing in the most awesome funky jazz break down which made me automatically think of those cool little moments when Dr Teeth band of the Muppet Show got to cut loose.  I mean, how cool would that be?   And then to top it all, the drummer does, or at least it sounds like he doing, a tap dance solo in the middle.  OK.  Name me another band that does that?

And if you think the anti-Trump shenanigans during a recent performance of Hamilton were impressive, then hold on to your hat. America takes the attitude of that show, blends it with the grit of Rent, and mixes it with the old world Americana drama of Annie Get Your Gun.  It’s a song with a scope as wide as its title.  It makes Neil Diamond’s Coming To America seem like some hack effort in comparison.  This is ironic given how France’s own epic is built directly off the same Broadway clichés created by writers like Steven Sondheim (West Side Story).  Everywhere you get lashings of the ‘American Dream’ and its contrasting modern disappointments.  Even the orchestra arrangements directly link through to the musical theatre saccharine, which is mined by the cart-load.  We could all laugh heartily at the comedy created here, if it wasn’t so close to Trump’s current dialogues on Twitter.  The lyrics are scarily close to the Orange One’s bitter diatribe of discontent.  But the difference here is that all this theatre is Broadway art.  For many now waking up post inauguration this is real life for many Americans.

America is not the best parody of bygone song writing to find a place on Hang. That distinction goes to the exceptionally camp and bulbous magnum opus Rise Up which opens with pretentious line: “pull yourself up from the fires of hell” and finishes with the time-worn cliché’: “That thing you’ve been searching all your life was with you all the time.”  In there, too is yet more candid cheese – look after your health, be good to yourself, strive harder.  Basically Bridget Jones’ self-help book case meets Richard Simmons at an Anthony Robbins convention.  They lay on the string-cheese with pneumatic air pump!

Slipping over to the West End for a moment, Trauma is a perfectly constructed chorus refrain from a show that doesn’t exist but probably should.  If Queen ever attended a Lloyd Webber production, and were impressed enough, they would have written this.  If he was selecting a song for his show I think this might be the tune Simon Morris gravitates to the most, given his penchant for bands like The Devine Comedy.  The operatic drama is stupendous.

Mrs Adams starts off with a riff from Randy Newman muddled together with Cat Stevens’ Days at the Old School yard then morphs into an interpretation of Bowie’s Oh! You Pretty Things sung by Costello trying to impersonate Prince and New York era Lou Reed – and that’s just in the first chorus!  This number is a musicologist’s nightmare. So many ideas in one 3-minute package.  But surprisingly, it works, although all that cleverness does blur the meaning behind lyrics to the point where I haven’t a clue what they were about.  Here I am/ In this Hollywood bar/ Press my face against the glass/ Can’t you see I’m making reservations? / Ah, for her birthday / Hey, Mrs. Adams / What you doing now with your gun in your mouth?

The album’s only real reprieve from all that grease paint comes with On Lankershim, where they take a bit of a departure down the backroads of AOR 1970’s A.M. band country music and for just over 3 minutes become the Eagles or the Allman Brothers.

As always, with a record as highly developed as this one there is the danger that the real messages behind all this brilliance might be overlooked.  We might just enjoy it all for the twee-ness and the irony and the pastiche and completely miss any hidden subliminals.  There’s also the slight chance that all these highly complicated tunes are just too damn hard to remember and the listener just gets put off by the overwhelming barrage of ideas and constant changing and shifting that occurs in every song.  I mean how will it be possible to sing numbers like On Follow The Leader into Shazam! and get back a conclusive result.  On the other hand, much of music today has is made for the lowest common denominator.  Dummied down for the masses.  Not always a good thing.  Perhaps a little cerebral over bombing is what we need.

The whole thing clocks in at just over 32 minutes but that somehow seems much longer as it demands such a constant attention that it’s almost too exhausting to do in one take.  But that said, it’s a project that is pretty impressive, especially for a duo that has a history of alleged self destruction.  The only thing missing from this faux-musical is the stage and the performers, and a plot.  And that is the real tragedy.  Or do I mean comedy?  Oh, well. Best keep an eye out for the play bill and neon signage.  You never know when the Off Broadway show might make its debut!  And if it ever does, it’ll be all singing, all dancing.  This will be no idle matinee performance.

Tim Gruar

 

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