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 Caught in the Carousel - Music Reviews and More
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Portugal, The Man
Church Mouth
Fearless Records
If you were alive, well and heavily sedated in the mid ‘70s, consider this your high school reunion. And if you only have Dazed and Confused as your visual reference, throw it on the DVD player with the sound off and crank up Portugal, The Man’s new long player Church Mouth. This is the log cabin tribute to lead singer John Gourley’s isolationist upbringing set in the wilds of Wasilla, Alaska, with only a generator-powered record player and old Led Zeppelin albums to keep him company. With steel-toe guitar progressions, Church Mouth wades through deliciously muddy rhythms making it glow with a dirty swagger. The lyrics are laden with alliteration, branded with titles like “Telling Tellers Tell Me” and “Sleeping Sleepers Sleep.” Reading the liner notes send you away with almost a Gertrude Stein-infused puzzlement—not that you could understand them through the watery vocals anyway. Yet the smoothness of the lyrical repetition combined with Gourley’s exuberant falsetto help you forget about the words altogether and zero in on the sonic nostalgia. While the heavily stylized wailing has moments of magic (“Sugar Cinnamon”) and some of the pitch choices are hard to resist (“My Mind”) the key moments here seem awkward and a bit forced. Though the band openly rebels against ProTools production methods, they might benefit from even the smallest amount of tweaking.
—Katie Cleland
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