Let You Down

by

The Kingsbury Manx

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My music tastes recently lean heavily towards downtempo, dub, and IDM. I find much indie music as tired and too esoteric for its own good. However, walking into Kims Video last week and hearing this superb album renewed my faith that sometimes the simplest songs can leave you breathless. This is a sublime album, much like the first time I hear Galaxie 500 On Fire, Boards of Canada's Music Has A Right To Children, or Leonard Cohen's Songs of Love and Hate. The songs are haunting, possessing a dreamlike quality that is both nostalgic and beautiful. Literally, these songs will drive you to tears, for no apparent reason. I'm eager to buy Kingsbury Manx's first release, I've heard it's equally amazing.

The cover of this album simply states "The Kingsbury Manx let you down," as if it were a sentence. It turns out to be a pretty accurate statement about the album.

I bought this album on a whim because I liked the name of the band, the cover image looked cool, and I'd heard that they are somewhat 60's-influenced.

What I got was a snore-fest. Are these guys all overdosing on Valium? Every song plods along in the same incredibly slow, hushed, deliberate manner. This includes the vocals, most of which are sung in harmony rather than by a solo vocalist. However, don't think Byrds or Simon & Garfunkel-quality harmonies here. There is nothing warm or even soaring about this music. These guys sound like they are bored to tears, or at least are aiming to bore everyone else.

I don't mind slow, mellow music, as long as it has some warmth or at least a catchy melody. These songs have neither. Everything sounds very cold and detached, even though some of the songs use major-key chords throughout. This has no heart.

With most of the songs, I kept wanting them to take off at some point -- to break free of their drone-a-thon shackles and blossom into the songs that they *could* be, the potentially good songs that are lingering just below the surface of all of this snooze-inducing stuff. But it never happens. The songs just drone on and on (most of them for too long), and it just ends up being extremely repetitive and monotonous.