The Go! Team. Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly. Maps: all 'groups' that started life in a man's bedroom before blossoming into the more pluralistic entities that we know today. Often this decision to expand is based purely on the need to replicate the music in a live setting. In the case of Lifeguard Nights, the creation of a band around the front man, Vincent Brue, occurred before the recording of the debut album, 'The Church of Song'. A product of Brue's prolific efforts alone in his room (according to the press release, he produced over one hundred songs in just six months), 'The Church of Song' squeezes 13 songs into the 43 minute running time, during which Brue deals cleverly with the well-worn topics of desolation, self-loathing and lust.
The album opens with a sermon, complete with hand claps and an enthusiastic preacher, welcoming the listener into an album that, like so many others, strives to address the problems of the world through the medium of music. This is music as a form of religion, if you will. This becomes particularly relevant in light of the first song proper of the album, 'Amen', which addresses two problems that have come to define the 21st century: religious intolerance and extremism. Rejecting not only Christian evangelism, Islamic extremism and celebrity Kabbalah but also the pseudo-spiritual 'hipster' crowd as 'assholes', Brue's argument is witty, yet meaningful. Backed by a jovial 8-piece band, including a wandering guitar line, and with a warm organ underpinning the whole shebang, 'Amen' is the stand-out track of the album.
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Yet while the lyrics are often original, unusual and, at times, even graphic ("I would love, love to gore, you and more tonight" in 'Matador'), the music quickly becomes formulaic and repetitive. Despite comparisons with Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band (especially Brue's rather worn, often mournful voice) and the aforementioned 8-piece band, too many of the songs pass by with little musical innovation; it's not until 'Bastille Day' - track eleven - that we get some much needed variety, in the form of bird song and the immediately recognisable sounds of the jaw harp. The 8-piece band certainly fleshes out the songs, but without any sort of variety and very few tangible melodic hooks, a lot of the songs fail to catch the listener's attention. Much like a preacher's repetitive drone, Brue's lack of variety ultimately means that the listener never really hangs on for the full 43 minutes, even if what he has to say is often worth the effort.
Overall, this album is a reasonable, if at times a little uninspiring, collection of unusual pop songs, only really worth picking up if you feel you have the patience.
(http://www.myspace.com/lifeguardnights)
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