The Judge
RAVES!
Date: 04/03/09
Album Review
The Green Room - "Any Other Animal" (Core Audio Records CAR008, 2007)
This, the second album from the Rhode Island-based five-piece The Green Room seeks to build on their 2004 début Not What It Seems, which came close to winning a number of awards. However, whereas that effort seemed to be all sharp edges and attitude, Any Other Animal has a more streamlined feel to it.
That is not to say that it is in any way bland, however: the same off-kilter mashup of styles is to be found in abundance, along with singer/guitarist Benny Carandini's waspish lyrics. So the album begins with KDBR, a sidelong look at a country music radio station out in the wilds of the Rockies which manages to include mentions of trucks, trains, farms and prisons alongside Carandini's rather artless attempts at pedal steel guitar.
This is no more than a whimsical prelude, however. The second track, Rock The World is where Any Other Animal really kicks in. On the face of it, this is just another "put your hands together" stadium-type anthem, but a listen to the lyrics quickly dispels such an image, as Benny snarls out his contempt for rock-stars who want to be Messiahs. "How can you change the world", he asks, "When you can't even change your underwear?". Fun is also to be had by spotting the 'quotes' from various rock classics which are slotted in at various points - can you spot references to Wishing Well, Smoke On The Water and (somewhat incongruously) Mull Of Kintyre?
We then have an instrumental interlude (the first of three) in Inactive Volcanoes Of The Philippines, in which Gordon Otak's synths combine with the band's solid rhythm section of John Richard Chamberlain (Bass) and Dave Connolly (Drums) to produce a track which might be termed 'banging ambient', but which becomes dormant at the end under the wafting flutes and oboes of fifth member Blake Reid.
This is followed by a diptych of songs about towns in New York State. Putnam Valley, NY is about a nearly wholly white middle-class town where, despite the veneer of respectability, dark deeds lie awaiting discovery behind the colonial-fronted houses. Carandini's sneer widens further, as one would expect, only for him to become much more exuberant in the second song, Rochester, NY, about a town with a population divided almost equally between black and white. This is obviously more to the singer's liking as his lyrics praise the liveliness and authenticity of the place and its people: "There are no closets here to keep your secrets hid".
After a long silence between tracks (a device perhaps intended to throw the cross-fade between the two preceding songs into sharp relief, as if some true and essential rupture has taken place), High Definition is a song about watching and being watched, where Carandini jabs at those who spend their time watching TV, not realising that - in a very real sense - TV (or rather, the people who run it) is watching them.
There follows the second instrumental, Acadia, in which Reid's woodwinds dominate along with Connolly's ethnic percussion, to form a pleasing break from the dark cynicism of the previous track.
Normality, as far as The Green Room is concerned anyway, is re-established with Right Of Conquest, the band's summing-up of Bush's America, where the destruction of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina is juxtaposed with a USAF bombing raid on Fallujah. There is nothing glib about the lyrics, however: "Where your Desert made our Storm", emotes Carandini, "Nature's storm has made our desert". Strong stuff.
The penultimate track, The Delta, is another instrumental, but here is where the album loses its way somewhat. The seascape ambience created primarily by Otak and Chamberlain is pleasing enough on the ear, but at eleven minutes plus it never really goes anywhere except up its own waterspout.
The album closes with a song to bookend the opener. WBAZ is a tribute to the contemporary rock station in New York State which was the first to play the band's demos in 2003. For this homage, even Benny's scepticism deserts him, and the whole song - well-played and well-arranged as it is - smacks of an uncharacteristic eagerness to please which doesn't sit well with the rest of the album and provides a disappointing end.
Overall then? A good set, but that old curse of 'the difficult second album' seems to have struck. They need more fire and a bit less water. Nonetheless, I would recommend you go out and buy it...
...except that you can't.
Confession time, folks. You have just wasted five minutes of your life reading (and I have just spent an hour or more of my life writing) a review of an album which doesn't exist, by a band which also has no reality.
This wanton act was sparked off by this piece in The Guardian today. I did something slightly along the same lines here almost exactly a year ago, but the Guardian blog encouraged me to go further. The band name was generated by a random entry in Wikipedia and the album title from the random quotation generator the Guardian's piece recommended, then the photograph (selected by going here rather than just to Flickr) came up by sheer wonderful co-incidence (and a proper acknowledgement here to the Flickr user going by the name of Wine me up whose photograph of the cat came up). After that, a bit of work in Paint Shop Pro and I had the cover. The track titles and names of the band members are combinations of various Wikipedia entries as well.
Once I had all that, of course I had to review it, just to add to the air of spurious authenticity.
Perhaps, in some parallel universe (of which there may be an infinite number) this album exists. If so, I hope they leave off the first and last tracks and tighten up The Delta a bit...
