Plumbiferous Media

Founded in Cam­bridge, Mass., indie band The Weepies have been active since 2001, and on the Net­twerk label for much of that time. Their newest and fourth album, Be My Thrill was released at the end of last month. Be My Thrill is cer­tainly a unique album, although it is not a par­tic­u­larly good one. Be My Thrill is, in fact, half-bad.

The album is a very odd com­bi­na­tion of overly diverse and very cohe­sive. Every track is a new expe­ri­ence, to the point where many really don’t have any­thing to do with any of the oth­ers, but at the same time, the instru­men­ta­tion changes such a small degree that the fun­da­men­tal sound of the album remains some­what con­stant. Even while the album con­stantly changes tone, gui­tar and bass plod along very much unchanged. The end result is really a worst of both worlds sce­nario. The album doesn’t make much sense as a whole, but at the same time, it could have done bet­ter with sig­nif­i­cantly more experimentation.

The other big prob­lem with Be My Thrill is in the record­ing. Sim­ply put, it really doesn’t do the gui­tar jus­tice (although the bass fares sig­nif­i­cantly bet­ter), and the per­cus­sion sounds, quite frankly, ter­ri­ble. After this many releases with Net­twerk, it’s hard to think of a legit­i­mate rea­son for why every­thing sounds so incred­i­bly canned. Really, the only relief is in the many tracks that are musi­cally engag­ing enough to allow the lis­tener to more or less ignore the absolutely mis­er­able pro­duc­tion values.

Talan and Tan­nen share both writ­ing and singing duties on Be My Thrill. Their voices are sur­pris­ingly sim­i­lar - clearly not so much that they could be con­fused - but the two singers share a soft, calm tone that fits their laid back approach to music well. Talan and Tan­nen switch between har­monies, alter­na­tion, and solo sec­tions, but what­ever the approach, the result is gen­er­ally quite sim­i­lar. This sin­gle approach isn’t excel­lent for vari­a­tion across Be My Thrill, but The Weepies do that approach well enough that it doesn’t get espe­cially dull at any point.

Befit­tingly for an album by a band named The Weepies, many of Be My Thrill’s lyrics are quite sen­ti­men­tal. That’s not a par­tic­u­larly bad thing, though, espe­cially as The Weepies do sen­ti­men­tal pretty well. Between the sim­ple but poignant “When I’m gone / Please speak well of me” and the less sim­ple (but cer­tainly more amus­ing) “Don’t know why you do the things you do, do, do / Holdin’ it together with some glue, glue, glue / Favorite color isn’t red it’s blue, blue, blue / No one knows / A red red rose,” The Weepies, occa­sional weak sec­tions and over-reliance on rep­e­ti­tion notwith­stand­ing, man­age to write solid lyrics.

Be My Thrill is a decent album. Unfor­tu­nately, it’s nei­ther var­ied nor con­sis­tent enough to be much more than that. That’s not to say that it’s bad - it’s musi­cally solid and inter­est­ing for the larger part of its length. The prob­lem, then, is that Be My Thrill feels like a very long, drawn out album, even though it really isn’t. To that end, nei­ther the length nor the con­tent is a sell­ing point - though that still doesn’t pre­vent Be My Thrill from being semi-decent.

This post is tagged 50-59, The Weepies