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Love Will Tear Us To Shreds Act I: And Quiet Flows The Dawn

www.adequacy.net

And Quiet Flows the Dawn is doomed from the start. It's another poorly played, country-tinged record, but there's a pile of those in every critic's cellar. Then there's the fact that it's a self-professed "rock opera" about Russian author Isaac Babel. Strike two. A great hitter excels under the stress of a two-strike count, though, so you have to have faith and press play. If you're like me, your impulse to make And Quiet Flows the Dawn stop will only be outweighed by the sort of innate pressure that forces you to glance a second too long at a ten-car pileup.

vee device wants to be a bluegrass band, or maybe an alt-country ensemble. Either way, they're better off with lower expectations and more pedestrian artistic choices. Before you can write a rock opera about a Russian writer that very few Americans can identify in a Russian Writer Lineup ("let's see...that's Dostoevsky, so that's gotta be Goncharov, and that leaves this guy here, with the mittens and the fur coat as..."), you should really master your craft enough to write a compelling, straightforward, three-minute song.

This record feels like a lot of first time writers' short stories do: forced, muddled, insanely ambitious. We've got arrangements and orchestration and a bare minimum of melody and cohesive structure. Claims are made of composition degrees in music and dissection of Shostakovich (wha?!), but a degree in music does not a rock songwriter make. It's like trying to write Infinite Jest when your only tool is an English degree and a couple of slow reads of Thomas Pynchon--you know what it should look like and how it should read, but you have little idea how much skill was required to create it.

The thing is, I respect these guys for trying. They could have listened to Being There a few times and cried their eyes out to the new Will Oldham record and tried to replicate that. They shot for the bull's eye with a broken bow, but at least their arrow is in the sky.

That said, the only thing scarier than the fact that this record made it to my doorstep is that Act II (promised to be in production as you read this) might not be far behind. Sorry, guys, it's not love that'll tear us to shreds.

Delusions of Adequacy -- Monday, December 11, 2006
By Zach Kuhn