 |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
Blotto
Singles Collection 2004-2007 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
Tracklist |
|
|
|
|
|
01. Wake up! dodo
02. YOUNGSTER (Kent Arrow)
03. PROPOSE
04. SCARECROW
05. BOAT HOUSE
06. The Pleasure Song
07. Serious Plan
08. Skinny Blues
09. Private Kingdom
10. Century Creepers (Voice of the Proteus)
11. Sweet Baggy Days |
|
|
|
|
|
Review |
|
|
|
|
|
Why do I feel more like I'm saying I have a skin disease than just confessing a guilty pleasure when I admit I like the pillows? Is it because crowds at US pillows concerts actually suggest a link between the band and skin disease, or because, even as someone who sings Strange Chameleon in the shower, I'm starting to get more concerned than happy when I hear a new pillows album is coming out?
the pillows really ought to be a perfect guilty pleasure band; they play irrepressibly catchy guitar rock with no frills or affectations and plenty of sappy lyrics and distorted power chords. When people praise the pillows, they break out words like "passion" and "authenticity" and "energy," because a good pillows song causes the kind of gut response that can only be expressed with giddily flailing language. This isn't music you appreciate for its intellectual rigor or for its bold experimentation; you like a pillows song because it hits you like a ton of bricks.
Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!, the latest pillows album, hits you like a wet dishrag. Even though the pillows have set the bar desperately low for themselves with years of similarly underperforming albums, even though an album with four memorable tracks on it would feel like a glorious resurrection at this point, Wake up! Wake up! Wake up! manages instead to be the most disappointing entry in the recent run of lackluster pillows releases. There is one whole worthwhile song here, "Scarecrow," with "Wake up! dodo" and "Century Creepers (Voice of the Proteus)" coming in as honorable mentions just for not being completely dull.
If you've listened to the pillows at all, you've heard "Scarecrow" under different titles; it's a slow, mournful song about holding on to friendship and hope despite the world being against you. But if you like the pillows, you probably don't care that it treads such familiar ground. It's a little amazing to have "My Foot" followed only a year later by an even more plodding song about the exact same thing, but it's still a solid track, and the best one here. As for the runners-up, "Wake up! Dodo" is a fun, playful song with more good hooks in one place than most of what it's supposed to introduce. It also ends at what feels like the two thirds mark, which would work well for an opening track if it wasn't followed by such an uninspired mess. And while "Century Creepers" wastes a lot of time strumming in place, it's nice to see that the pillows can still manage a catchy song at something above a languid pace.
The rest of the tracks don't really warrant individual mention; they're a uniformly boring musical morass. You can hear good melodies poking through the mush here and there, but they never last more than a few seconds before they're swallowed by some nose-wrinklingly bad riff. Their lyrics are reconstituted from images and phrases used in older, better songs. Even if we know by this point that the pillows only sing about a handful of things, it's hard to even remember what made those tricks work the first time around with rehashes this bland.
It'd be interesting to see a new direction, or at least a less thoroughly-used one, from the albums the pillows so doggedly insist on churning out each year, but in light of recent releases it seems more reasonable just to hope they'll go back to something that worked. the pillows themselves certainly seem like they're trying to stick with what they know, and yet the output of enjoyable dwindles lower with each annual release. And with the pickings slimmer than they've ever been on Wake Up! Wake Up! Wake Up!, it gotten hard to even find any guilty pleasure in listening to the pillows. |
|
|
|
|
|
back to reviews |
|
|
|
|
