Review Summary: Indie songwriter meets classic rock band. Results actually pretty good.
As you get older, you begin to realise that popular music has, since the birth of rock'n'roll, been defined by its obsession with youth. In the grand scheme of things, the vast majority of artists don't survive as a genuine concern for too long beyond their first couple of albums, if indeed they make it to that point - by that point, it seems, they're too old to be relevant. Any brief look at a typical Top 100 list will reveal an abnormal amount of debut albums, particularly within hip-hop, a genre largely dominated by classic debuts and disappointing follow-ups. The oldest artist in today's UK Top 20 singles chart is Kylie Minogue, at 39 - the youngest is Adele, at just 19. When the 14 year old JoJo charted, we took it in stride, but when the ex-King Crimson member Gordon Haskell nearly had a Christmas number one at the age of 57, it became a sensation. While logic might indicate that a songwriter becomes better with experience, popular music seems determined to demonstrate otherwise.
All of which means it's quite nice to hear an album like
Lotus that's been made by a band like Tranzfusion. The band advertise themselves proudly as being 'well into their third decade', meaning that four of the five members are likely to be over the age of 50. It's that fifth member that provides the twist, though - Josh Davis, the band's singer and resident DJ Shadow name-a-like, is only 28. It's his creative impetus that's caused this band - who still have a list of the classic rock songs they cover on their website - to record and release an album of original material at such a late stage in the game.
The danger, of course, is that with a genesis like that,
Lotus could easily have been a very bad album. Any band who's been playing covers for 30 years will naturally have difficulty in writing new music that isn't derivative, and it's not hard to imagine the kind of creative differences that would result from an age gap of over 20 years. What's more, Josh obviously comes from an indie background that could so easily have been completely at odds with what Tranzfusion do musically.
Yet, it works, to a surprising extent. Rather than sounding like a covers band, the musicians here use their influences tastefully and intelligently, cleverly referencing the likes of The Doors ("Tethered"), Eric Clapton ("All Fade Away"), Elvis Costello ("Till You're Unknown"), and The Beatles (compare the drums on "Lotus" to "Tomorrow Never Knows") in a musical setting that frequently sounds more like power pop than classic rock. Their musicianship is impressive and versatile, yet always understated; it'll probably take most listeners three or four attempts to really appreciate how much acclaim the band deserves for their work here. "All Fade Away" is probably their finest moment as a unit - it's a song that frequently sounds like it's about to take flight, yet instead allows the tension to build gently as the lead guitar (at its best here) weaves its way around the vocal. A less intelligent band would explode into life during this track, but instead, things actually get quieter, and the tension is never quite resolved. They're certainly a lot more subtle with their music than they are with the song titles - "Not Fade Away", "Mr. Blue Sky", "The Needle And The Damage Done", and
The White Album's "Good Night" all get mercilessly ripped there.
It's the vocals that help tie the album together as a unit, though, and it's also those same vocals that make the band's claim of
Lotus sounding like Elliott Smith backed by Crazy Horse ring true. Josh Davis quite obviously worships Smith, and as a result every melody, every vocal inflection, every bit of production had been geared towards making Davis' voice sound as much like Smith's as possible. It's actually a little jarring at first, and if you didn't know what this was you could conceivably mistake it for a lost Heatmiser album. That isn't really a criticism as such - if you're going to copy someone, then you should definitely be aiming for a target this lofty - but it certainly colours the initial impression the album makes.
And yet, and yet. Just when you think this will turn out to be a true hidden gem, just when you're really impressed at how good some of these songs are, the wheels fall off completely. The lazy "Saturday Blues" might be the most cliched thing released in 2008, and if I were to describe "Stage Toys" as Stone Roses-esque it'd say all too much about how bad it is. "Myself and Me" is better, but not good enough to make up for what's before it, particularly when it's followed by the clumsy, needless tempo changes of "Pale". By the time that "Goodnight" - arguably an album highlight - rolls around, you'd be forgiven for having switched the album off. Whether you'll let those three duds have an impact on your impression of the album as a whole is ultimately down to you, but it doesn't change the fact that for the first 10 songs,
Lotus is a genuinely refreshing listen from a band that, should the pop landscape be believed, has no right to be as good as this.
