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 Caught in the Carousel - Music Reviews and More
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Dudley Saunders
The Emergency Lane
Fang Records
Initially, I approached this album with a less than enviable trepidation and hesitancy. It was summarily advertised as an "hallucinatory experience," and was considerably lauded, praised and touted to the skies for its tenacity and bravery in terms of lyrical content (it boasts of having songs written explicitly to or for prostitutes, serial killers, and poorly-bearded messianic figures indiscriminately nailed to various kinds of wood). My reticence stems from a kind of half-hearted, default state of annoyance when it comes to meretricious or insincere music. In general, bands dealing with the aforementioned grab-bag of street crawlers, flesh-flayers or mythical father figures tend to sound like Ween or the Frogs—not that I have any expressed prejudice or malice towards either of those groups (I like the former and adore the latter), it simply tends to grate (thus the odd imbalance I find with the Vaselines compilation, and my vicious hatred of everything ever recorded by the nebbish, snot-streaked likes of They Might be Giants).
I was rather surprised by this release because it was disarmingly sincere, unwavering in its convictions and the content of its songs. It's relatively well-assembled and has a decent atmosphere to it, but it fails to really register as anything substantive. Saunders' voice tends to vacillate between the terrestrial woe of Jeff Buckley and the astral, elastic and otherworldly wail of Scott Walker (though it fails to really evince the power or ingenuity of either). The music simply holds no surprises. Nice, fine and fair are the barest and basest of adjectives as they represent a complete lack of anything fresh or inventive—thus, I have great difficulty in describing my reaction to this album (as I didn't really have anything resembling one). I simply let slip an immense sigh and seemed to sally fecklessly forth, putting whatever the hell was next in line for a spin in the cd player. The most enthusiasm I could possibly muster for it would be my relief that it did not use its content as a novelty, or in a hollow and literal way. It does, admittedly, take an ample dose of fortitude to write about some of these things in so "straight" a manner, but it doesn't necessarily make them interesting.
—Brandon DiSabatino
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