Lives And Treasure, Acrylics’ new album starts off on an interesting note with the song “Counting Sheep,” a kind of surreal, synthesizer-laden lullaby. The mood kind of sets once “Molly’s Vertigo” comes up—a mood marked by detached instrumentation and terribly careful and sober vocals.
From a dispassionate music teacher’s perspective [speculation], the album does a fine job of using synthesizer and percussion effects, with a little guitar thrown in every so often to make the singing seem less ghostly. After all, none of the notes are missed, everything is synchronized and production is tight; the problem is, I managed to indentify almost no emotion whatsoever for almost the entirety of the album. There’s no love, there’s no angst, there’s no joy. Maybe they’re concentrating too hard on playing correctly. They’ve got the material, it just doesn’t seem like they feel it.
The words were easy enough to memorize, but I found myself hesitant to sing along, afraid that a mistake might shatter the fragile piece of crystal Acrylics seems to treat each song as. There is one piece that actually flips this relationship on its head, lending some humanity to the playing, but the lyrics themselves seem to be tongue-in-cheek, and I wasn’t sure if it was intentional or not, “Asian pear/Do you care?/Cause all of this night we spent spinning around and around/I was there/In your prayers/Asian pear/Do you swear?” The song is sung so mournfully, and the guitar and drums match the tragic tone, but these words made me think I had stumbled upon a lovechild of Pagliacci and a book by Dr. Seuss.
In A Word: Robotic
