Wait a sec.
Shhh, just shush. Give me a minute. I’m
grooving here. I can’t be expected to write about this record while it’s making
me squiggle around all over the floor, can I? A man has his limits, and that’s
mine, right there.
Daniel Francis has currently got my butt
wigglin’, that ain’t no lie. “Unrecognizable” is 100% fun, a blast of seven
tunes, treats really, filled with wide-eyed enthusiasm and hooks for miles and
miles and miles. Each one is a taut confection of guitar-tinged new wave with
enough quirk to keep you interested but not too much to put you off. (To be
fair: it takes an awful lot of quirk to put me off.) It’s kind of like
Mothersbaugh’s original music for “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou” spun
into visionary power pop, each song just begging for a mid-1980s run on some
late-night MTV show. I don’t know what was on MTV late at night in the 1980s, I
was too young to stay up.
Regardless.
“Unrecognizable” should probably be played at a
fairly loud volume, and you can totally imagine Doyle and the group
herky-jerking around like David Byrne in a huge boxy suit. Even the closing
title track, packed as it is with cathartic anger, contains enough twists and
turns and zaniness to keep you guessing. Still, nothing takes away from Doyle’s
clear bitterness that seeps into the fisted piano hits by the end. But then of
course the tape starts right back over with the James Murpy–meets–Adam Ant–ian
“I Had to Do It,” and the bops return, and the smile is plastered, as it has
been for all of the moments we’ve already gone through. My face might be
unrecognizable if this turns into a painful perma-smile. It’s a medical
condition some of us have to deal with.
OK, OK, so you got me to write something. Now
can I get back to this?
--Ryan
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