Reviewed by Eric Saeger
Bletch. “Too much clarinet” shouldn’t even be on the list of possible complaints one could have about a non-jazz record. Okay, this being rubber-stamped as an Americana record, pretty much anything organic can pop up in the recipe book (except fricking clarinet, come on), and I don’t envy the road Apollo took to his artistic epiphany, a bad car accident that left him unable to walk for many months. I should add also that there are certain types, probably not you, who live for rickety crypto-folk that owes any cred it ever gets to eels [band, not slithery things – Ed], fans of stuff like this, droopy people in the subway you wouldn’t want to hang with anyway for fear that you would really truly die of boredom. Apollo’s voice is a lazy Thom Yorke, not that the paltry excuses for melodies in these compositions warrant Pavarotti – there’s no soul, no tunefulness, just a motley heap of whimpering wimp-alt. I dunno, am I being too nice to this hopeless crap?
Grade: D+
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1V0CsKubp6s
