Author: Sandi Sadar Šoba
Artist: Fair To Midland
Label: eOne Music Records
Release: 2011
Length: 54:37
Rating: 5/5
Texas has its share of exceptional minds, and no, I don’t mean Walker – the Texas lawman. This time the excitement is purely musical, because after the outstanding Fables From A Mayfly: What I Tell You Three Times Is True I could hardly wait for the follow-up. A lot happened in between: a label change and a farewell to Serjical Strike, a shake-up in the rhythm section (in 2011 they swapped both bassist and drummer), yet the drive of their ideas and the creative hunger to spread out alternative concepts of how we perceive the world around us, while keeping their musical integrity and recognizability, stayed untouched and unscathed. Considering they had to bridge a four-year gap since the superb and much-praised Fables From A Mayfly, the world held its breath wondering whether there was anything left to add without repeating themselves. Honestly? Yes! The Texan musical brain trust managed to keep the edge, the pop-tinged progressiveness, and the artistic, analytical approach to what music actually means as a phenomenon in space and time. Arrows And Anchors is a record you could call a perfect wormhole, one that sucks you in and beams you 55 minutes into the future: hit play and you first melt into bodiless matter, then after the last track you pour back into reality, just so you can do it all over again, but more on that in a bit.
When I first fell for Fair To Midland, it was thanks to the melodic, almost playful yet mighty magnetism of Darroh Sudderth, who in many ways resembles Cedric Bixler Zavala, the frontman of At The Drive In and Mars Volta. Young Sudderth has charisma and an exotic pedigree (a hefty dose of Native American blood is to thank for much of that exotic flavor), an unspoiled and fully functioning brain cortex, and a huge amount of talent. The same goes for the rest of the band, who can pour into sound the dark, mighty, emotional cryptic side of prog, where Americana, Delta blues and juicy alternative metal live side by side in symbiosis. Much like what happened in El Paso, where Mars Volta put down roots, a new tectonic shift started in Dallas a little later, pointing toward an intelligent take on alternative, not the syrupy, Nickelback-style or weepy Creed-style kind. Alternative became a full-on opposition to commercial expectations, and that spectrum of music tastes a lot sweeter to me, even if its fruits are often saturated with bitterness, sadness, melancholy and articulate sourness. In a Beatles-y kind of way, Arrows And Arrows is an incredibly melodic record, but it also packs way more distortion and shadow than the pretty light-drenched Fables. What you can feel in every single spore of each of the fifteen album offerings is that the record was woven from a belief in their own inspirational mantra. When you say something, you have to believe it, and Fair To Midland’s eclectic range sits damn close to Tool, A Perfect Circle, S.O.A.D., early Mars Volta (back when a bit more rock impulsiveness ran through their veins and less jazzy pretension) and even a certain outstanding neighbor of ours, Father. Still, I can’t shake the feeling that in the sandwich of thick distortion, melodic songs and Darroh’s sweet vocalizing about feeling, the world and the play of coincidence, there should be at least a few drops of cynicism, and there aren’t.
What grabs you is the choice of producer. Joe Barresi has kneaded and strained the sonic outbursts of bands like Queens Of The Stone Association… Queens Of The Stone Age, Coheed And Cambria, The Melvins and I could go on, but with Fair To Midland he steered the train less and gave the guys’ artistry and creativity free rein, so they squeezed out in the studio what the band is capable of squeezing out on stage. The distillate of pure explosiveness, enthusiasm and brilliance reflects the perfect chemistry of the band’s generative core, where substance matters more than any concept, and where they follow the inner imperative of a musical Prometheus without restraint.
The fact is that the compositions are far more mature and complex than in the past, and to the ear there’s ten fingers’ worth more melodic, harmonic ballast and guitar edge, while next to the organic distortion the truly outstanding keyboards claimed a thick slice of the sonic pie. After the church-organ address of the intro Heavens To Murgatroyd, a guitar landing follows into the superb, chaos-packed Whiskey And Ritalin. The recipe of doubled vocal lines and guitar – keyboard interplay that distinguished, say, the excellent song Dance Of The Manatee is still here, but the path through the maze of lyrical storytelling is considerably tougher. As if it wanted to push us into trying the substances sung about in the track. That’s why the lead track and main single of the album, Musical Chairs, is so much closer to the sex appeal of the celebrated Fables. The band cohabits and works as a solid, compact unit, even though changes happened along the way.
Darroh is a chameleon of emotions and an outstanding vocal interpreter, and the whole sonic picture, despite its apparent lightness and light-soaked feel, is denser than the densest tissue in the universe. Uh-Oh is a sensual continuation of the guttural mantra, and it lets Fair To Midland enroll in the premier league of rock stage gladiators without a hint of an inferiority complex. Amarillo Sleeps On My Pillow is a tribute to the blues and country roots of Texas, and Darroh can sing sweet, easy passages just as well as shaman his way through full-on guttural metal parts, Native American style, without coming off as silly or fake, which is a quality very few can empirically prove. I think of Maynard and, I don’t know why, Mike Patton … I could go on with a cell-by-cell analysis of the whole record, but I couldn’t capture the full textures of tailor-made musicality stretching across the entire 55-minute timeline of this truly outstanding musical experience, which has no shortage of playfulness (say, in Short-Haired Tornado or Golden Parachutes …), schizophrenic toying with the permitted and the (un)expected (whoever hasn’t heard Rikki Tikki Tavi hasn’t heard anything, because in the middle of a vision of a stoned hippie rainbow, pure-blooded death metal sneaks in), and brilliance to the nth power.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aOoqqa7yRM
One fact remains: intelligent and unique alternative is getting scarcer in the modern music machine, but as long as the ranks of its defenders include people like the young guns of Fair To Midland, there’s no need to fear for the survival of quality music. The magic of perfect excess is a craft they know well, and their music is food without which the soul goes hungry and starves, so after this fourth dose of sonic steroids, both the strength and the frequency of your doses of quality music need to go up. Fair To Midland are a tornado of pure mojo, leaving behind on the plains of ballless posing a great many disappointed posers with soft intimate parts that not even Doctor Frankenstein himself could revive to a swift erection. For that alone, Fair To Midland deserve their big star on the Walk of Fame and a place in the Hall Of Fame right now, and Darroh should swap out the White House’s set of clowns for the new world order – or actually, no, he should stick to music, since he’s incredibly good at casting spells (and so is the rest of the band …). And Arrows And Anchors is, simply put, finger-licking good – and I mean licking down to the bone, the brain and beyond, and in that hypnotic bliss I wouldn’t care about pain, or the passing of time, or even Death himself!
Lineup
Darroh Sudderth – vocals, banjo
Cliff Campbell – guitar
Jon Dicken – bass
Matt Langley – keyboards, marxophone
Brett Stowers – drums
Production
Joe Barresi
Tracklist
1. Heavens to Murgatroyd
2. Whiskey & Ritalin
3. Musical Chairs
4. Uh-Oh
5. Amarillo Sleeps on My Pillow
6. A Loophole in Limbo
7. Typhoid Mary Sends Her Best
8. Short-Haired Tornado
9. The Upset at Bailey Bridge
10. Rikki Tikki Tavi
11. Golden Parachutes
12. Bright Bulbs and Sharp Tools
13. Coppertank Island
14. Three Foolproof Ways to Buy the Farm
15. The Greener Grass
