Review Summary: One folking decent piece of light hearted music, with a few minor flaws along the way.
Imagine yourself sitting in a great big field on a sunny day with three of your best friends and your acoustic guitars. Imagine the inspirations that are waiting to be discovered. Imagine the inner peace to be found in each individual. Imagine the overall happiness that our world seems so deprived of in this time. This is exactly mood the super-group Monsters of Folk attempted to achieve with their debut album; in the long haul they succeed with their self-titled, but the sound they create is nowhere near perfect. This lack in perfection is a little disappointing considering the album took five years to make and each member of the band has a background in folk-influenced music. These members are: Jim James of My Morning Jacket, Conor Oberst and Mike Mogis both of Bright Eyes fame, and M. Ward of the duo group She & Him.
The album’s presentation is generally warm welcoming, the type of music is blaringly obvious from the band name, the album cover shows the simplicity that the band represents with their light hearted and free loving souls. As a whole, the whole project that the four have created is just simply a fun little collection of fifteen relatively short happy songs. These monsters of folk throw absolutely no curve balls at the listener, and more or less, you get exactly what you were expecting and what you were promised.
The album begins on a rather unfortunate note, as the first song “Dear God (Sincerely Monsters of Folk),” is the ugly duckling of these fifteen songs. While not necessarily bad, the song sticks out like a sore thumb as it has a very different sound from all the rest with its fluffy vocals and violin making a cheesy little opening that drags out for five minutes, the longest song on the album. It would be more enjoyable perhaps if it was alone and away from a compilation of songs, but it completely messes of the flow of the album right off the bat. Much more enjoyment would come if “Dear God” was completely removed and the album opened with “Say Please,” a magnificent introduction to the talent presented here. “Say Please” beautifully blends quick acoustic guitar and scattered electric guitar raging through it, even having a decent little solo in the middle of it all. It is Conor Oberst though who really shines though as when it is his turn to sing, he belts it aloud and proud like back in his young Bright Eyes years.
This light breezy feeling is continued well through the bouncy “Whole Lotta Losin’” that makes you feel a bit like square dancing, or the loudly proclaimed lyrics in “The Right Place” in which Jim James shows his singing talents. As this hour long album goes on though one cannot begin to hear a similarity in all the songs and if you lose focus off the music from just a minute or two all the songs begin to mesh together and you will be long lost somewhere in this monster. When listening to this album one has to allow themselves into the music, they cannot wait for the music to appeal to them or else this will just be background noise, and this is the biggest downfall this self titled release has.
On the other side of that though, if one does allow themselves into this collection and searches for meaning and beauty in it, they will find it and love it. When it comes down to it this album is all about personal interpretations and this is a bittersweet gift a musician can give their music. If folk is your appeal than this is a definite must to listen to because chances are at least one of these song will strike and emotional chord in the listener, but the rest of the songs will probably just be ignored.
