Flare Acoustic Arts League
Affairs of the Heart
Flare Acoustic Arts League’s (FAAL) album, ‘Cut’, arrived on my desk yesterday morning. It’s the latest project from New Yorker LD Baghtol, better known as the brains behind experimental band, LD & The New Criticism.
Sometimes we read the first line of a CD’s press release and toss it straight in the bin like a used wank rag. But we read the press release for ‘Cut’ and figured – “What the fuck, this looks interesting” – and stuck the CD in our disc drive.
Perhaps it was because the album features a vast array of artists, including members of Arcade Fire, Magnetic Fields and Belle & Sebastian, that FAAL caught our attention. Who knows? Certainly wasn’t the CD sleeve, which, let’s not beat about the bush, is a little bit on the crap side.
The previous CDs we’d listened to hadn’t cut the mustard and so on hearing the beginning of Cut’s opening track, Reminiscences of Minnesota State Training School Alumnus, Class of 1905, we experienced something akin to unearthing a long-lost gem.
Opening with what sounds like an old recording of a gypsy band, it kicks into an instrumental pic-n-mix of stunning orchestrated-pop.
This is all well and good and certainly gets the old heart moving, no doubt by pulling on its strings, but where to from here? Well, there’s no doubting that Baghtol has talent as a lyricist, but where the album falters is the lack of musical ebbs and flows.
Musically it represents placid water, bar the odd track like ‘Ballad of Little Brown Bear’ as performed by NYC’s gay rugby team. Hardly a highlight, but there’s certainly something trippy about burly men singing in camp, fairytale baritone about a ‘little brown bear’; especially if you’re sinking into your sofa having reached the perfect stoner high.
As a whole, ‘Cut’ is an example of an album trying a little too hard to be clever and emerging somewhat pretentious. Then again, when it comes to the whole art-house music movement, isn’t that the whole idea?
Let’s face it, we just about passed our GCSEs, just about scraped into college, blagged our way into University and almost failed to graduate; maybe our brain lacks the capabilities of registering just how good this album is. Who the fuck knows?
Cut is available now on the Affairs of the Heart label.
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