Review Summary: Oh, Recklessness, where have you been hiding?
It’s been ten years since the release of Wax Fang’s masterpiece La La Land, and unfortunately only a little over a year since I heard it for the first time. I won’t be too hard on myself for waiting nine years to get around to listening to it because, well, I was six when it came out. Not only that, but it seems like not a whole lot of other people have gotten around to listening to it either. Last I checked, mine was the only rating on this album. I’m not even trying to pat myself on the back or anything, that just seems really depressing to me. La La Land is an album that demands to be listened to. It’s the kind of album you listen to once and immediately recognize it as one of the greats. As with any great album, the full extent of its greatness is only comprehended upon multiple listens, but I digress. “How good can an album by a band who is most well-known for scoring an episode of American Dad be?” Well, sputnik has a word limit so I can’t really give you a note-by-note analysis of the entire thing, but I’ll try my best.
The closest comparison I can find to La La Land is Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane over the Sea, which is strange considering how La La Land is an over-the-top homage to prog-rock, rather than a noisey indie folk album. The reason I draw this comparison is that the tone is unmistakably Neutral Milk Hotel. Anthemic, life-affirming compositions backed up by poetic vocals that seem to enforce the cheery nature of the songs, but upon further lyrical analysis contain song topics as gruesome as something you’d find being shouted on a Death Grips album. Just replace sparse, noisy guitar chords with intricate, face-melting solos, and Jeff Mangum’s nasally croon with Scott Carney’s operatic, manic belts, and voila! And that’s not at all to call this any sort of Neutral Milk Hotel rip-off. La La Land is definitively its own beast.
For starters, the compositions on this album are about as layered and indescribable as anything you’d find on any other great prog-rock album. At its most intense on tracks like “World War II (Part 2)” and “Can You See the Light”, Scott Carney’s guitar work belts almost as loud as his vocals in a frenzy of competing, layered guitar riffs and power chords (with an emphasis on power). All the while, Kevin Ratterman’s drumming can be heard firing away so fast that it mirrors a marching band, if said marching band was drumming for their lives, trying to make a frenzy loud enough to be heard from the International Space Station.
For such an over-the-top band, Wax Fang effortlessly transitions into subtlety on moments from the opening track “Majestic”, the acoustic ballad “Oh, Recklessness”, to the epic 9-minute closer “Wake Up Sleepyhead”. On the opener, a quiet arpeggiated guitar waltz creeps in, with a lullaby-like melody softly layered over it. This eventually gives way to sharp, staccato piano chords and Scott Carney’s style of manic opera being introduced to the album. Similarly, the closer opens with about a minute and a half of subtly beautiful guitar-created atmosphere. The song morphs into a life-affirming power-pop anthem, then fades out while wind chimes play for three minutes to close out the album. On “Oh, Recklessness”, the band goes for a subtle approach throughout the entirety of a song for the only time on the album, creating a pleasant, nostalgia laden interlude of sorts.
Now, La La Land cannot be discussed without addressing the lyrics. As stated earlier, these lyrics are dark as all hell. The themes address heartbreak, war, death, and insanity with the kind of grandiosity you might here in a children’s movie narration. For an album like this to begin with a song that contains the lyric “If you’re searching the lines for a point/well you’ve probably missed it./There was never anything there/in the first place”, it sure is appealing. This is perhaps its most obvious relation to ITAOTS, given their similar flavors of rose tinted nihilism. The previously mentioned “World War II (Part 2)” shifts jarringly from obscure metaphors to shockingly blunt imagery, until the climax of the song, which describes in brutal detail the consequences of war, immediately followed by a chorus of “la-dee-da”s to block out all the aforementioned horror. While being the most violent onslaught of war-time tragedy on the whole album, the rest of the lyrics do not shy away from the subject of war. In fact, this subject matter is really only completely interrupted by the two instrumental tracks “At Sea” and “Avant Guardian Angel Dust”. The former is a drone-y interlude that makes the sound of kazoos into something actually emotionally effecting and somewhat ominous by layering them over each other countless times and adding heavy doses of reverb. The latter is a post-rock barnburner, building off of a simple riff, and adding every single theatric quality you’d expect from a track off this album.
Now, I wish I could go track-by-track on this thing, as I’ve barely even mentioned some of my favorite moments, but track-by-tack seems to be the Nickleback of the sputnik community, so I’ll spare you all. All I’ll leave you with is a call to arms: do not let this album be forgotten. Even if I have to scream it from the rooftops and tell every single person I know for the rest of my life about this album. This album deserves far more than a single rating on sputnik and an IMDB credit on for some Seth MacFarlane show.
