REVIEW: Far, Tin Cans With Strings To You (Epic)
- Shirley Brown
Every once in a while I run across a band that makes me really happy. It's hard to explain, but when I put this disc in my CD player, I just had to turn it up really loud and bounce around the room. This is odd for a couple of reasons; first off, the music just isn't bouncy. Most of the time, it's a hard, driving wall of sound. Secondly, I usually don't bounce. It just isn't me. In any event, I really like this band. I've even braved some pretty random venues to go see them. Almost everyone I have tried turning on to the band seems to like them, too, so I know this isn't one of my weird little psychopathic breaks.
There's something really honest about the music. The initial impression is that Far are part of that "anger rock" genre, but they're really not. They don't whine, their lives are not ending tomorrow, they don't advocate hatred or violence, and the music doesn't make me want to run out and shoot up. They write about real things, but in a random way that makes you think, or at least smile. For example, the single, "Love, American Style" is this kind of Natural Born Killers song about a serial killer and this woman who falls in love with him; I cite OliverStone's movie because it's a commentary on how the media glorifies violence, but expressed from a slightly different point of view than I've heard it before.
The sound is, well, LOUD, with bits of metal and bits of hardcore, not quite sounding like either. It really hits that primal core of emotion, the way only really good driving music can. But it's not angry - more like pure emotion. Heavy low end, the kind of music that makes you want to stomp around in heavy boots. I would use the word tribal, but there really isn't anything there that one could pinpoint as being tribal. Jonah, the lead singer, has an interesting voice. He can do the soft, melodic thing really well, and sometimes even sounds little boy-ish. For more than half the record, though, he gets raw and raspy, without sounding painful. He conveys emotion well, on a basic level.
I suspect that a large part of both the bouncy impulse and the honesty is that Far really love what they're doing, and this can be heard in the music. I think that all good music comes from what Eric Clapton calls the core and is a pure expression of emotion. In the case of Far, whatever emotion they are expressing is always tinged with the joy they feel when they're creating their art. A bit esoteric, perhaps, but I don't know how else I would describe it. In any event, producer Brad Wood (Liz Phair, Sunny Day Real Estate) has done a marvelous job of capturing the band's core on this disc.
I know that the band has been known in the past for being overly experimental, but with the release of Tin Cans With Strings To You, Far seem to have hit upon the right mix of the tried-but-true with the new.
