It's hard to say how much damage the I-pod has done to how discerning we are when it comes to music. It's so easy to get bored with an album and move on after the first six or seven tracks. It was only ever a small amount of effort to change over a CD, but now you can browse through your whole collection and just go with exactly what you want to hear. Myspace too has taught us to judge a band on the smallest amount of information. A band can often be judged on the few tracks they post online. It certainly makes the job of the album that much harder.
Many bands fall down by deciding what they're going to sound like and failing to move from this stance. Experimentation with the sound is where all of the best music comes from, and it's easy to lose interest in a band when all they offer is more of the same. Take Los Campesinos!; a band who showed so much promise and innovation. Their debut was a huge disappointment because they stuck to the formula they had created, and by the end of the album it felt like they had laboured the point considerably. The Cribs have now mastered this - last year they released several quite frankly stunning singles, but failed to capitalise on this because many of the album tracks were below par in comparison. If you want to keep us right there until the dying seconds, then many of us demand variety.
THE BOGGS have hit the mark by having so much going on over the course of 'Forts' that it's very hard to get bored. They explore various styles and it's hard to pin down exactly what you'd call them. They don't exactly transcend genres, it's more that they make really complex folk music.
At times it's folk music that's built upon, layered with a harem of instruments on each track that make each one stand out from the other. At other points, it's classic rock and roll of the sort emulated by The Von Bondies, again with enough going on musically to make it stand out from that particular genre. It's art-rock as a whole, but it seems desperately unfair to pin them down to one label; shortly I will pin them down to three.
'Forts' is not a willfully difficult album. It's filled with catchy melodies and there are enough foot-tappers mixed in with some slower songs. There are no conventions to stick to in terms of style, layout, and who plays what on each song. It's an album that seems free of constraints, and where music and innovation take priority. And it's great. The ensemble feel to this is perhaps the one thing that runs through it - it feels like there is a lot of music within the music; these songs are very much a sum of all of their parts, and that's why they work so well.
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Spread out across 'Forts,' three distinct styles come into play. There are lo-fi dance songs with a real kick - think Liars versus The Rapture with a dash of CSS - that provide the most frenetic moments on the album ('Remember The Orphans' & 'If We Can't (We Can)'). It's organised chaos and these songs build into something that would quite clearly make you dance like a bastard were you given the opportunity. The drums lead the way on the songs and it's extremely effective percussion.
Then there is the classic rock element - the aforementioned Von Bondies style songs ('So I So You', 'Bookends'). There's always a little something else in there (like a tiny Jazz section coursing through the riffs), though, it's more the structure and the feel to them. It's also a nice contrast to some of the more outlandish moments on the album.
Finally, there is the folk element, which manifests itself in two ways as well. There are the more traditional folk standards like 'After the Day' and 'The Passage', and then there are the more complex ones, which provide some of best moments on this record. 'Little Windows' seems simple enough on first listen, but as the song progresses, more and more elements are added, it gets faster and eventually it's turned into a rather large number that has you completely hooked. It's rare for fourteen tracks to keep you so engaged, unless it's on a compilation.
The only criticism is that two versions of 'After the Day' (one with male vocals, one with female - two very versatile voices, it should be noted) might have been a bit self-indulgent, but when the rest of the songs are this interesting, it seems churlish to complain.
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