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The Young Fresh Fellows - I Think This Is Audio CD

A fair review of the The Young Fresh Fellows "I Think This Is" Audio CD. Please note that the below review is the views of the authors, and authors only. You can get a complete list of all The Young Fresh Fellows reviews here, or go back to the The Young Fresh Fellows tabs.

The Young Fresh Fellows Band: The Young Fresh Fellows
Title: I Think This Is
Rating:
Release Date: 2009-07-07
Media: Audio CD

Tracks: 1: Guilty Ones 2: Lamp Industries 3: Suck Machine Crater 4: Betty Let the Good Times Crawl 5: Never Turning Back Again 6: New Day I Hate 7: Go Blue Angels Go 8: Used to Think All Things Could Happen 9: Your Mexican Restaurant 10: Shake Your Magazines 11: After Suicide 12: If You Believe in Cleveland 13: Ballad of the Bootleg

One of my favorite album's this year!
It is a warm, friendly voice that exudes confidence and a knowing wink, as if you're an old friend that he's sharing an in-joke with. Scott's strong vocals and clever lyrics are the centerpiece of "I Think This Is," his voice sounding something like a cross between Ray Davies and Jerry Garcia. The music is pure guitar-driven, melodic pop/rock, nimbly performed by other Fellows, Tad Hutchison, Kurt Bloch, and Jim Sangster, with a guest appearance by Peter Buck of R. E. M. Anyone expecting this album to sound like vintage YFF might be let down. People change, times have changed and while their music retains the same Beatlesque melodic sensibilities, wit and intelligence, it's a little mellower and darker than their earlier offerings. That means "depth," people!

The album opens with "The Guilty Ones," and the line, "Got a crappy apartment, with staples in the wall. " But there's a melancholic tinge to the melody that provides the yin to the lyrics sardonic yang. All the time Scott has spent recording and touring with Robyn Hitchcock in recent years seems to have rubbed off on him, for "Betty Let the Good Times Crawl," would have been perfectly at home on the Soft Boys classic, "Underwater Moonlight. " And it just so happens that Robyn Hitchcock produced this record and did a stellar job.

Every song here is a gem, even the somewhat perplexing "Go Blue Angels Go," which I read somewhere online was written specifically as the theme song for some new cartoon show, which would explain why it seems kind of out of place. But if I have a quibble with this album it would be with the song length. Many of the 13 songs clock in at around two minutes. They're like songlets; melodic vignettes that I long to hear fleshed out a bit more. Some favorite tracks: "Your Mexican Restaurant;" the wonderful "Shake Your Magazines. " (Lyric sample: "In your coffee shop with your poetry, you think you're pretty French but you're not!") and "Suck Machine Crater. " But they're all great; shimmering pools of liquid sound with sunlight dancing on the surface. This album makes me feel better about humanity. Its humor, its intelligence, its warmth, its wonderful melodies and stellar musicianship just make me go "ahhh. . . "
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+1/2 -- The Young Fresh Fellows stock up on irreverence
With band leader Scott McCaughey having joined REM as an auxiliary member and turning out albums with the loose-knit Minus 5, the Fellows have become something of a side project. Seattle's Young Fresh Fellows return with their first album since 2001's Because We Hate You. Add to that the late-80s departure of co-founder Chuck Carroll, and the band's irreverent ethos is more of a thread than whole cloth, stitching things together rather than organically binding twenty-somethings who live and play with one another on a daily basis. The new songs, two by guitarist Kurt Bloch, two by drummer Tad Hutchison and the rest by McCaughey, capture the band's loony humor if not its early fraternal bonds. There are a few newly minted Fellows classics here: "Go Blue Angels Go" is the theme song for a yet-to-be-created hydro-plane themed limited animation TV show. "Let the Good Times Crawl" is a convincing Sunset Strip garage rocker sent back from 1965, and "Lamp Industries and "Suck Machine Crater," whatever their inside jokes are about, are bouncy pleasures. The foursome still delivers wacky songs stretched across a deep love of pop, punk and rock sounds with simple punch and energy. 3-1/2 stars, if allowed fractional ratings. [©2009 hyperbolium dot com].


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