Review Summary: Inching towards the Christmas album
Once upon a time, I went to see Dick Valentine do a solo acoustic gig. Once the show was up, he emerged from backstage, chatted to people, sold copies of his solo album, and a good time was had. Eventually he wanted to clear off, blaming the vindaloo he consumed earlier. At that point an overdressed vixen that was making horrible attempts at courting him patted him and said “Go take a poo for me, Dick”. The returning stare betrayed no trace of surprise, or in fact emotion of any kind. Dick Valentine is a man who’s seen everything that can come with the territory of being in a rigorously working band. Every year since 2005 has seen a new release from Electric Six and plentiful touring on both sides of the Atlantic. Eventually, acoustic-centric solo outings joined in, and those were soon joined by a variety of crowd-funded projects. Given the average of three records a year, an acoustic rendition of Electric Six songs had to happen at some point. Apparently that point is now.
Quiet Time is little more than a cash grab, and not even a particularly well executed one at that. Attending one of the aforementioned solo acoustic gigs is going to include some choice deep cuts from the Electric Six back catalogue (it’s easier to strum out chords on a guitar than it is to get a whole band with limited rehearsing time to learn a new tune), and Quiet Time is packed full of all sorts of nuggets from the past decade. The problem is that the delivery ranges from pedestrian to jaded through most of the disc. Additionally, a lot of the featured tracks are already quite clean-guitar-heavy in their original incarnations, pointing towards a natural path for the acoustic to follow. This combination makes the bulk of the album feel horribly phoned in, offering dumbed down autopilot renditions instead of some sort of meaningful reworking (or even capable recreation). The worst offender is “Steal Your Bones”, stripped of all the intricate orchestration glory of the original and reduced to a heap of directionless chord banging and uninspired wailing. The feel of cutting corners is further amplified by the fact that an alarming number of songs end with a burst of quick strumming, making the already feeble renditions feel even more pointless. Dick seems to be aware of that fact, and teases one of them in the middle of “The Band in Hell”. That doesn’t make them any more bearable though.
Another problem is that Quiet Time isn’t exactly sure what it wants to be. On the tin, it seems to want to capture Electric Six songs in an extremely stripped down acoustic setting akin to what one would get at one of those gigs. However, those gigs don’t have random overdubs. As such, on one hand we have moments of concert-like one-take rawness, like a scream running out of power at the exact wrong moment of “Take Another Shape”. This sort of stuff has its charm, but drags a very specific sort of album style in with it. On the other hand, a distinctly un-gig depth is added to “When I Get to the Green Building” with a kitschy synth playing a sloppy, misfit melody that slightly helps the song’s climax before obliterating its coda. The overdubs are few and far in between, but destroy the concert-like immersion offered by the songs done seemingly as intended. If this is to be a somewhat faithful recreation of a Dick Valentine solo-show-style repertoire of Electric Six deep cuts, why add any extra sprinkles at all? And if adding sprinkles, why not put some more effort into them and the takes used and make the whole thing less insipid?
That’s not to say that Quiet Time is an entirely cynical affair. Some of the songs properly “click”, with notable examples being the two Evil Cowards tracks. “Sex Wars” is lovely with its basic strum patterns and minimal vocal backing, showing what the album might have been if more damns were given. “Rich Kids” features the record’s best arrangement and turns a piece of mid-album filler into something wonderful. “Heartbeats and Brainwaves” comes with similar prior version stigma as “Steal Your Bones”, but a hazy reimagining into a faux-country drawl, complete with changing the song’s key, works against all odds. “Iron Dragon” sounds like a good gig – the vocals bob and weave in terms of execution, but they also offer a wistful, sheep’s-eyed edge that sucks you in. Unfortunately, these tracks only make up a quarter of the album. Given the fact Dick Valentine was free to cherry-pick the material for the disc, and the choices feel like important songs to him, it seems most probable that good portions of the remaining 75% sounding the way they do stems from the record being rushed. This thing was apparently tracked in a day. If it took you a day to get four great renditions, why not take four days and have sixteen great renditions instead?
Oh yeah, and the moment in “I Buy the Drugs” where Dick’s daughter offers a brief vocal snippet is adorable. You can feel him beaming behind the controls.
