Published on Dec 16, 2005
Roller is: big bold sparkly crunchy
feed-your-head modern rock. Roller isn’t: easily reviewed.
Bear with me, now…
Tvfordogs is the power-trio brainchild of
singer-songwriter-guitarist-producer Neil Luckett, with whom I
first became acquainted via Wampus Multimedia’s terrific Warren
Zevon tribute album, Hurry Home Early. As for Wampus, it is
— and I mean this in the best possible way — the Island of Misfit
Artists when it comes to the indie label scene. Head Wampus Mark
Doyon seems to have a love affair with the true iconoclasts of the
scene, and the feeling appears quite mutual.
Tvfordogs is yet another example of said, a British
power trio who bounce gleefully from style to style, sounding one
minute like a punked-up Rush — “The Universe Is Blue” opens this
disc with a virtual Geddy Lee homage — and the next like slightly
less obtuse early R.E.M. (“Natural Science Fiction,” “Be Careful”).
It’s all solid indie guitar rock in character, but there’s a steady
evolution through this album in terms of sound and approach. As the
heavy opening pair give way to “Roller” and “Everlasting Sun,”
Luckett and company focus increasing attention on melody and vocals
rather than crunch, revisiting Nirvana-esque heaviness only briefly
(“Monolith”) before turning out a startlingly effective pair of
ballads in “100x” and “Drive.” As if to illustrate Luckett’s
propensity for throwing rocks at convention, the final third of the
disc is highlighted by the thundering, propulsive theological query
“Where Is Your God?” and the nightclub jazz-pop outro “Time To Go.”
No, really!
Complete artistic freedom does not come without
hazards; at times Roller simply got too dense for me, with
so many ideas and styles and moods competing for space that the
music begins to feel like a puzzle you get frustrated trying to
solve and have to set aside for awhile. Still, the rewards are
there for those who seek them out. It was a single line in “Drive”
that convinced me to review this album — “I’m not even sure if we
should be forgiven / So we drive” — and there’s plenty more
nuggets of that caliber to be mined here.
In the end, the group that tvfordogs really reminds
me of is Semisonic, one of those too-cerebral-for-the-mainstream
bands whose octagonal musical persona never would fit into the
square hole their major label had in mind. (Dan Wilson, Mark Doyon;
Mark, Dan. Don’t leave the room until the contracts are signed!)
It’s a dehumanizing experience you see fewer and fewer bands
choosing to go through in the modern age of indie labels and d.i.y.
artists. Kudos to Neil Luckett for sticking to his creative guns,
and to Mark Doyon for supporting his vision.