Review Summary: These vegetables needed more time in the saucepan.
Heavy Vegetables' second album,
Frisbie, undoubtedly boasts a distinctive sound. With its mixture of your classic 90s alternative rock sound and ever changing rhythms that would feel right at home on a Mathcore record, the album immediately opens itself up to a bunch of interesting directions. While I think Heavy Vegetables' do fully utilise a few great ideas, they fail at taking full advantage of the sound that they have made.
My main problem here is how short the songs are here.
Frisbee has 28 songs in total with a runtime of 46 minutes, meaning most of the songs barely exceed 90 seconds. This isn’t necessarily a problem, but when a lot of these tracks end before they have reached their full potential, it leaves a lot here feeling half-baked.
Song For Wesley has a great hook, but it never takes off and ventures from it.
Mushroom Boy is one of the mathier cuts here, but its intense crescendo is reached only after a really brief buildup, giving that almost immediate crescendo no room to breathe. Another track that ends immediately as the great idea is introduced is
E/Or where the instrumentals cut out, leaving a dynamic vocal melody by the two vocalists, but then it just ends. The instrumental
The Ducks at Ralphs features a great palm muted riff paired with a nerve inducing dissonant piano, but the track ends before it leads to anything more. There is no payoff, leaving this previous intensity feeling kind of wasted. And these are only a few examples of interesting songs that left me feeling disappointed from the album.
Again, there is nothing necessarily wrong with short songs, but they work best when supplemented with longer tracks, whether it be a quick blast of riffs or calming melody preceding the storm that is the next track. When an album is full of these short bursts, it leads to most things feeling inconsequential, even if a lot of these short bursts had great moments. But it is only moments.
However, there are songs that do reach their full potential and end at a satisfying time. The subdued ballad,
Sad Mud Song, has a great grungy riff driving the melancholic melody. While there isn’t exactly a lot going on here, it does allow for the listener to fully soak in the ambiance and emotion of the track before the riff and melody become too tiring.
Frisbie fortunately ends with a high as well, with six minutes of creative riffs following odd time signatures and two vocal lines that seamlessly weave together.
Going Steady With the Limes is a climatic end showing the full potential of their mathy alt-rock style.
Overall,
Frisbie is an album full of talent and great ideas, but very little here is given the room to fully develop, leaving most of the songs here anti-climatic and unfinished. There is almost too much creativity here, where instead they should have honed down on a few and fully fleshed them out. But what is here is fine, good even, but it could have been a lot more.
