Ever been in a situation where, while you're sure you know where you are and are well familiar with those around you, you can't get a sense of place and feel like a stranger in a strange land? It can be a more disconcerting sensation than being hopelessly lost sometimes. Such is exactly the sensation one gets when listening to Floored By Four's debut; the collection of artists involved are well-established and have historically had a very intimate relationship with their fans but, for this one-off venture, each band member (bassist Mike Watt, guitarist Nels Cline, drummer Dougie Bowne and multi-instrumentalist Yuka Honda) takes a gigantic step out of their artistic comfort zone and pays tribute to a muse that most fans would assume to be well outside the scope of their powers: an instrumental album that favors texture above all else.
You're skeptical – and you have every right to be.
The complicated thing about Floored By Four's self-titled debut isn't the fact that the band's members travel to the outermost limits of what most listeners would perceive as conventional songwriting (everyone in the group has often maintained a love of free jazz, and been very vocal of that adoration), it's that the break from each artist's norm is perfectly complete; Nels Cline has developed a reputation for making unusual sonic creations when on his own (read: not with Wilco, most recently) but he has always relied on some semblance of melodic performance to make the music accessible, Mike Watt has always been a powerhouse bassist and both Honda and Bowne have always favored pop structure as a framework from which to hang their unconventional sonics. From the beginning to the end of this four-track, forty-four-minute curiosity though, none of those staples makes an appearance as Mike Watt gets modal in his performance and falls back in the mixes, Honda and Bowne release their hold on pop convention and allow themselves to meander stylistically and Cline doesn't so much fall off the map because, really, he never didn't even start on a recognizable landmark here; choosing instead to dribble down into a prolonged examination of a Lee Ranaldo-ish mess. The results would be interesting for fans, but none of the four tracks really succeeds in leaving a lasting impression because no one in the band throws listeners a bone and offers some sort of contextual point for the songs, they simply exist as a free-association poem would; present, but formless and only meaningful in a totally abstract sense.
Artist:
www.chimeramusic.com/
Album:
Floored By Four is out now. Buy it here on Amazon .
