Koufax Aims High But Struggles For Focus
Too many influences weighs a well meaning album down.
Koufax
Strugglers
Released on Sep 23, 2008
Basketball is easy. Either the ball goes in the hoop or it doesn’t. Either Michael Jordan makes that last second shot or he doesn’t (please disregard that Michael Jordan does NOT miss last second shots). Kobe either cheated on his wife or not (don’t get me started on whether or not the ring the size of Neptune he gave her afterward means anything). But that’s what makes basketball easy. Koufax makes music seem that easy.
Strugglers, Koufax’s fourth attempt, hits like the opening tip-off, a rush of excitement in the form of a blaring horn chorus (a new addition to the lineup) behind jaunty afro-centric rhythm’d indie-pop. It sticks its neck out past Vampire Weekend’s level of pomposity while still, somehow, maintaining credibility.
The album continues with an energy that rivals the hyper-fertility of the Palin family. On every track, Koufax gives birth to yet another art-nouveau influence, pouncing past the usual tricks that so many indie-pop bands churn out. On the only slightly-less impressive side, Koufax’s former detriments like lead singer and sole surviving original member Robert Suchan’s voice has been tailored and is now trim to fit for the masses. The formerly whiny and nasally frontman has been tuning up while turning down the outright political agenda that plagued his previous work. Without driving the nail too deep, lines that refer to the American people thinking that “thought” is a “virus” finally have a chance to linger in a listener’s mind – the proverbial bullet that goes unnoticed past the head of the listener is transformed into a tapeworm, festering, suckling on the good vibes of the music while causing unalterable change in the end-result: admittance of the truth behind each line.
That’s not to say Strugglers is a complete success. While the world view of the rhythms (combining everything from jazz and garage-rock with big-band and slam-poetry) makes it a force to be reckoned with in terms of a triumph in musical combinations, the effort involved in listening to such an album bears a strange closeness to its namesake: it’s a struggle. Koufax manages to use every influence they can rip from the “M.I.A.-handbook-of-trend” and keep it all sounding remarkably like it could be passed off on an episode of 90210 (the new series, duh).
And that’s what it feels like by the end of the work. These stories have been told before. This music has been played before. It’s the production and maturity of Koufax that stands out. The musicians (a constantly rotating plethora of performers) are wonderful at what they do, and most tracks stick out hit you in the gut, giving that satisfying wallop that knocks you on your ass and yells at you to stand back up. At the end of it all, you just can’t figure out what it is you even just heard, but it made you dance.
High Point
“Once In a While’s” wailing saxophone makes me wish I never had sold that beautiful piece of brass from my youth.
Low Point
“California Taught Us Well” has a tropical vibe that, at this endpoint of the album, feels overwrought and forced; it pains me to dislike it mainly because the song is actually performed quite well.
Posted by Mark Steffen on Sep 18, 2008 @ 7:00 am
