Villains

Alright, time to try out the new style. No more "good song-bad song," no more rating scale. I'm not the all-knowing deity of musical quality, after all, so I'll settle for just posting my personal thoughts on whichever album appears first on my shuffled playlist. This way I can account for subjectivity instead of perching atop that cursed ivory tower of "high art," and we may focus more on the effect of a given album rather than just the same old "form, fluency, and composition" approach I favored before.


Artist: The Verve Pipe
Album: Villains
Release Year: 1996
Genres: alternative rock, grunge

1) Barely (If at All); 2) Drive You Mild; 3) Villains; 4) Reverend Girl; 5) Cup of Tea; 6) Myself; 7) The Freshmen; 8) Photograph; 9) Ominous Man; 10) Real; 11) Penny Is Poison; 12) Cattle; 13) Veneer.

This was another of the albums I picked up at the pawn shop, and I must say it was one of the best ways I've spent a single dollar. It did take me a few listens to pick up on exactly what makes this album different from the piles of other pseudo-post-grunge albums out there, but it came to me. There is real texture in this one, real evidence of loving craft. Sure, the songs mainly follow the verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus format, but there are all these subtle touches that really bring out the different tracks and give the album real depth. There's this constant mood throughout, so the whole thing sounds like standing in the middle of a slow, gray rain...and it's a beautiful thing.

"The Freshmen," the album's big radio hit, does its work well enough. It's pretty and it's painful, and I do like the minimalistic guitar work. I still prefer "Reverend Girl," even though there is little in the style to separate it from its peers. I mean, that slurring repetition of the title in the chorus has been done a million times before, but this time there's the distraught lyrics and a nice piano-driven bridge to make it more believable. "Now my lover smells like rain," Vander-Ark sings, and in that moment, I'd say she certainly does.

It's all about the little breaks from the normal style. How could "Cup of Tea" sustain its roaring chorus without the surreal, poetic lyrics and the little "dig it!" in the middle of each verse? What would make me love the chorus of "Myself" more than the unexpected switch to falsetto in its last iteration? Who would expect the guitar solo in "Drive You Mild" to last as long as it does, or for it to actually accentuate the meandering verse structures before and after? And who the hell would expect a song as traditionally-sung and -structured as "Penny Is Poison" to sound as real as it does? I didn't, and I was pleasantly surprised. These guys know how to write a song- too bad they let mainstream pressure get the better of them down the road.