Review Summary: A lot of good in a confined space and all of a sudden you are stuffed.
Fred Thomas has a neck for handful of different styles. It is quite obvious that the guy appreciates and is actively trying to fit into the boundaries of old school Indie and laid-back Punk music, oftentimes giving off a vibe of some late 70s Post-Punk or even the late 80s pre-Britpop nonchalance. But his attempts at reaching into every direction and grabbing every fruit on every tree might just be this album’s greatest flaw.
You see, it is nice to hear people in 2017 still very much trying to play around the old styles that seemed to have been long forgotten, but it would have been nicer, had those people also known when to stop with throwing homages and start taking routes in particular directions. Fred Thomas’
Changer is quite a dizzying little album, mostly because Fred can’t quite decide on what subgenre or even production style to land.
From the get-go, the track “Misremembered” is your usual calm wordy ballad that hides a certain level of chagrin underneath. But after that, on- the song “Reactionary”, we suddenly go into some more or less Ariel Pink-ish Psych-Pop directions. Still musically similar to the opener, but already reeking of different direction. But the suspicions that the album might not be all that stabile come true once the mellow, lo-fi “2008” comes around. The song has that dizzying lazy vibe to it that just doesn’t really correlate with the previous tracks or even with the following ones, such as a straightforward ballad “Brickwall”. Why such a difference in production, one could only guess.
The record seems almost bipolar in a way. It acts absolutely differently song after song. Overall, it just stops sounding like a cohesive album, but more like a randomly shuffled playlist you make on your phone. And that’s a real shame, considering that separately, the songs are often times absolutely fantastic. If there is anything Fred excels at, it’s smart, witty and down to earth lyrics. His bittersweet touch of realism is just lovely. But he really needs to pick up the album pace for the future, because the sudden mild ambient slumps like “Changer”, “Infuriated” or “Oval Beach” can hardly coexist with the vibrant lo-fi “2008”, “Open Letter to Forever” or “There Is No Need to Participate” or, who, in turn, can hardly coexist with the angry, harsh “Misremembered”, “Voiceover” or “Mallwalkers”. You can see the dissonance.
