Review Summary: Loose Fur tries to mix calm folk with frenzied, random chaos and it comes out confused.
Over the weekend here in the Philadelphia area, there has been tons of publicity for the winner of the world’s ugliest dog competition. The winner lives in Jersey, a little outside of Philadelphia, and we need to claim something since all of our sports teams suck. Seriously, this thing looks hardly real.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/thenewswire/archive/2007/06/23/uglydog.jpg
Still, besides the point stated earlier, I could not understand why we care so much about the world’s ugliest dog. Is that something to be terribly proud of as a region? Then I realized that it is the same reason we celebrate Glenn Branca, Sun Ra, and Bartók. Ugliness, when done right, is cool. Most musicians try to remain consonant throughout most of their work, but the most forward-thinking, advanced musicians were never afraid to use dissonance. Loose Fur has that going for them. Unfortunately, the artists who used dissonance correctly either dominated their music with it or used it appropriately. Loose Fur tries to win the show dog and the ugliest dog competition at the same time, and it ends up sounding awkward and forced.
Loose Fur combines Jim O’ Rourke and Jeff Tweedy, along with drummer Glenn Kotche. Tweedy asked the two others to play with him at a performance, and they ended up writing some new songs. Those songs ended up on this eponymous album, released in 2003. These songs were the first works between the three, although they later went on to produce Wilco’s
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Such humble beginnings these men had. On its surface,
Loose Fur is an album of lengthy, calm folk songs. O’Rourke and Tweedy share vocal and lyrical duties between them, although neither of them does entirely well at that. Luckily, the bulk of the album is instrumental and their vocals have little prominence on any of the album. Tweedy has the best vocal performance on the album with “You Were Wrong”, a short, downtempo and lazy song that captures the calm atmosphere of the album perfectly. With edgy clean guitar about to lash out at any second and the restrained drums, “You Were Wrong” teeters on the edge of falling apart into chaos, but it never does. For that reason, it is the best song on the album.
The rest of the album follows two sounds, the calm, lazy folk played best in “You Were Wrong” or a strange, empty chaos where nothing makes sense (intentionally). “So Long” tries to combine the two, with random electric guitar spurts and cymbal crashes overpowering light vocals and a simple guitar progression. For a while, it sounds interesting with the juxtaposition between serenity and pandemonium, but when the band utilizes similar techniques in every song 5 minutes and over. Furthermore, there is no climax to any of these songs or to the album. “Liquidation Totale”, an instrumental, comes closest to climaxing, revolving around the same riff that builds to more of the same non-sensical cymbal crashes and guitar stutters. Unfortunately, Glenn Branca used a mysteriously similar riff better in “Lesson No. 2”. All in all, the music on
Loose Fur is just too long, overdone, and often unenjoyable. This is just your middle of the road dog. Not too ugly, but not too pretty either.
