Dead Girls and Other Stories have magnificent skulls. They must know this. Their finely sculpted jaws and head bones appear prominently on all album covers and promotional materials.
And with their rotating staff of musicians, they always manage to find new band members with equally fine skulls.
I imagine their try-out sessions to be a series of phrenology exams replete with calipers and CAT-scans.
I don't know much about DGOS. My only impression of them is what I can glean from short, surface-skimming articles about them which appear from time to time in this paper or that web page. And Lava's Rebecca Icing claims they are really hard working. Which I can't contest.
Musically, I'm not all that inclined to pursue them. But those skulls...
Hmmmm.
Anyway, this is about music, isn't it? And like I said, I'm not all that interested in the DGOS school of pop music. Nothing against them personally, it's just a genre that I avoid. But when faced with a hellbent fixation on bone structure the best thing to do is concede to the weakness.
I found the first album, Dying to Belong, to be stiff and square; somewhat amateur in all the obvious ways. But that is what makes the new album interesting. The polished smoothness of "Full of Life" indicates either that DGOS are on a sharp learning curve or they hired some good producers.
Aside from natural maturation, there is one key element which makes this album infinitely better than the last. Their new keyboard finger lady, Marilyn Older.
Who has remarkable skull. Pure Wednesday.
The two most delicious keyboard tracks are right up front. "Too Much Weight" features a goth/synthetic Rocky Horror Picture Show organ pipes riff and "Liquid Joy" is pure candy keyboards.
Unfortunately, DGOS opt to let the keyboards fall to the wayside after they get their money-candy songs out of the way on the front end of the album.
Which is too bad, because the best written songs anchor the rear end and it would be pleasing to hear Older featured more prominently in this context. The stretch from "Smoke is Rising" through "Fly" (spanning four songs) comprises the best of Full of Life. By this point on the album the band has gotten all of its poppy songs out of the way and can get about the business of making music the way they hear it - not the way they think it should sound. The finest moments come in "Goodbye to the Trees" featuring a haunting and uncredited violin and "Smoke is Rising." ("I got an elephant on my head/ He's dancing barefoot thinks he's Fred Astaire...")
"Smoke is Rising" is also one of two disturbingly odd rip-off moments on this album which I can't help but mention here. As artists, we are entitled to musical allusions but these are almost so obvious that I question their intent. "Smoke Is Rising" begins as a dead ringer to Gillian Welch's "Tear My Still House Down." Likewise, the intro to "Garbage Can" borrows some too well known Neil Young riffs.
All in all, if you follow the DC music scene closely, this is an interesting milestone in the development of a band which refuses to fall quietly to the wayside. Where as Dying to Belong was an initial statement, a hat in the ring, Full of Life is a more mature and better constructed creation with new confidence and a new bag of toys.
Same skulls. |