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September 07, 2005
Devin Davis -- Lonely People of the World, Unite!
 | It's been a good year for musical genius auteurs. People like Jack White, Brendan Benson, Sufjan Stevens, and the king of all indie musical genius auteurs, Conor Oberst, have all successfully put their visions on vinyl (or plastic, as I guess CD's would be) this year. |
Now add to that list Devin Davis, who, with Lonely People of the World, Unite!, singlehandedly created one of the best CD's of modern but retro-rock instant classics you will find. Davis wrote the songs, played most of the instruments, and sang all the vocals. I guess, since he must have been down in his basement alone working on this music for some time, that it's fitting that it would be an album full of songs dedicated to loneliness and the lonely.
The lyrics are wild and inventive stories of relationships fleeting, past, or never-to-be. Included, and perhaps most representative, is the song Turtle and the Flightless Bird, which tells the tale of a turtle who comes upon a bird with a broken wing. They are a quirky, but beautiful, pair. The turtle sings:
We may not live up in the sky where the air gets scared when the planes go by but you can hop up on my shell when we crawl across the highway. 'Cause we might get flattened today but at least we lived here long enough to say "hey hey, you're the one for me."
This touching and heartwarming fable is quickly followed in the next verse by a story of love lost, where the narrator (perhaps, the turtle himself) drinks himself to sleep and rhetorically asks: Won't you ever come back to me? I haven't got what it takes to wait and see. The theme is repeated throughout the songs: You might find someone, or think you found someone, or want to find someone, but you will never get to be with him/her and we are all alone. In Paratrooper With Amnesia, inability to connect with someone is compared to inability to pull the ripcord (to save one's life as he falls). Giant Spiders is Davis' most optimistic song, with its clumsy but catchy chorus "I won't sit still 'til I'm upside down in the back of your eyes" and the confidence that the singer and his partner can survive everything from oil spills to nuclear holocausts to, of course, giant spiders.
Musically, the songs sound (in the best way) like the classic rock of the 1970's with fuzzy guitars and horn sections, and insistent hooks. Included are both straight-ahead rockers like Moon Over Shark City and When I Turn Ninety-Nine, and smooth ballads (Sandie, Deserted Eyeland) that build from acoustic guitars to large swelling choruses. The melodies are outstanding and despite what clearly is a highly produced sound (since it was one guy doing part after part by himself), the songs sound raw and alive. That is mostly due to Davis' vocals. He doesn't quite hit all the notes, though it's certainly not for lack of trying, and his ardent style fits the songs perfectly.
This is a true gem -- a coherent collection of resonant songs that happens to also contain, individually, some of the best 3-minute rock songs you'll hear these days.
P.S. - Did I mention the 2-measure silence in the last song?!? It rocks!
Posted by JoshHornik at September 7, 2005 06:17 PM