Plumbiferous Media

Octo­ber­man is a Van­cou­ver indie band founded by Marc Mor­ris­sette in 2003 as a side-project to his main group Kids These Days. Draw­ing from his expe­ri­ence with Kids These Days, Mor­ris­sette has cre­ated two albums with Octo­ber­man, both fairly well-received. Octoberman’s lat­est album, unfor­tu­nately, does not live up to the stan­dard of its ear­lier work. Fortresses has some merit, but is ulti­mately crushed under the weight of its many problems.

Marc Morrissette’s vocals are not among the strongest parts of Fortresses. From the album’s begin­ning with “The Back­lash,” Morissette’s vocal style can best be described as an emo­tion­less whine. Accord­ingly, the album as a whole is des­per­ately lack­ing in vocal strength, as Mor­ris­sette never shifts away from this style, which becomes oner­ous after a very few tracks. The few attempts to increase the inten­sity of the vocal ele­ment to Fortresses are not espe­cially suc­cess­ful, leav­ing Morissette’s voice sound­ing strained and frankly more irri­tat­ing than before. In addi­tion, Morissette’s vocals never quite blend prop­erly with the instru­men­tals, leav­ing Fortresses sep­a­rated into sev­eral mediocre layers.

The best thing that can be said about the lyrics of Fortresses is that they’re well-suited to Marc Morrissette’s vocals, but given the vocal issues with this album, that’s no com­pli­ment. Lyri­cally, Fortresses has very lit­tle mean­ing­ful con­tent (with the excep­tion of “51,” which rather amus­ingly cov­ers a US annex­a­tion of Canada). Instead, it’s com­posed of mediocre rhymes, badly-constructed lines, and frankly per­plex­ing writ­ing deci­sions. The open­ing track is per­haps the best exam­ple of these prob­lems: Mor­ris­sette sings “‘Cause peo­ple really hate your band / They write about you when they’re online / Join in on the back­lash / I guess they choose to waste their time / Rip­ping your band.” Whether Morrissette’s sub­ject is truly the reac­tion to another band or whether he’s sim­ply attempt­ing to dampen crit­i­cism of his own, it’s an utter flop. Per­haps it’s meant as sub­tle com­men­tary - but it comes off as an embar­rass­ing misstep.

In con­trast, Fortresses’s instru­men­tals are often quite accept­able. While some tracks are not at all note­wor­thy, many make nice use of con­trast­ing or con­tra­pun­tal lines. A strong exam­ple is the sec­tion start­ing around 3:20 of “I Know a Nurse,” which is a sim­ple, small instru­men­tal inter­lude that main­tains the sound of the track while allow­ing the instru­ments to diverge from what they had pre­vi­ously been play­ing. What is then per­plex­ing is the jux­ta­po­si­tion of tracks like “Thirty Rea­sons,” which repeat short, bor­ing lines with lit­tle to no change through the entire track, with the end result being a very bored lis­tener even after (in this case) only two and a half minutes.

The most likely cause of this dulling of cre­ativ­ity seems to be the infec­tious qual­ity of the vocals, which is clearly reflected in the dynamic lev­els of the album. To say that the album remains at the same vol­ume for its entire dura­tion would be false, but to say that the vol­ume level fluc­tu­ates much more than that would also be a bla­tant lie. Exclud­ing the pauses between tracks, which become the most exit­ing dynamic changes on the album, vol­ume fluc­tu­ates between a solid mid­dle level, and medium loud (bor­der­ing on medium).

The prob­lem with Fortresses is that even if it had one of the most incred­i­ble instru­men­tal parts ever recorded, the vocals would pre­vent it from being a ter­ri­bly strong album. As it is, Fortresses does not have an incred­i­ble instru­men­tal part. There are a num­ber of strong instru­men­tal sec­tions, but over­all, the instru­men­tals are decent at best. Fortresses has good instru­men­tals, an over­all sound that ranges from above aver­age to well below, ane­mic vocals, and sub­stan­dard lyrics. Over­all, as an album, Fortresses is not successful.

This post is tagged 30-39, Octoberman