Frontispiece of Gulliver the Great and Other Dog Stories by Walter A. Dyer, 1916
Santa Cruz songwriter Tyler Martin is back again with his gang for another James Rabbit album. Tyler has been recording under the name James Rabbit since 1999, although I'm guessing that he was in his early teens when he started making these home recordings. The band has put out a dozen or more albums in the intervening years, and Martin's songwriting talents have grown in tandem with the project's scope and participants. They recently released Perfect Waves, and it contains all the components that I was excited about when I wrote about James Rabbit (and their last release, Coloratura) last fall: "the ramshackle charm, the borderline pretentious whimsy commonly found in college freshmen, the kitchen-sink-on-a-budget instrumentation, the gang/glee-club vocals and scatting."
Perfect Waves is an impressive accomplishment, an overstuffed pop extravaganza that's almost seventy minutes long. It's a challenging listen - I've been listening to this album for weeks, and I feel like I'm still just beginning to know it. This is because the song's structures are mostly non-linear, taking weird detours and seldom visiting the same territory twice. This means that you can't expect the band to revisit any choruses, so you better enjoy every hook as it comes along. The album has no shortage of hooks, though, so you won't miss any section too much when it gets abandoned in the album's exhausting headlong rush from start to finish. Tyler Martin listens to a lot of music and absorbs a lot of ideas, resulting in some excellent sounds here - tribal drum intros bump up against horn flourishes, and the hoe-down fiddle hook of "A Closer Look" has little in common with the highlife-by-way-of-Graceland guitars of the next song, "In Love with the Idea". But it all fits together like a complex puzzle only Tyler Martin understands.
Perfect Waves does have a few problems. Martin's lyrics have always been unironic and confessional, but they reach levels of upbeat can-do sloganeering here that border on the grotesque. It's hard to pin down what makes it more off-putting, but I find myself cringing at the lyrics more this time around. Do they really need two different tracks that contain lists of their favorite artists and albums? Okay, you like Shuggie Otis - we get it. Also, the album is a little longer than it needs to be - in particular, it ends with a three-track coda that doesn't contribute anything new. I'm hoping that the wild experimentation here indicates that Martin is about to turn a corner in his songwriting - he's still young, and we may see better lyrics and more disciplined songwriting from him before too long.
The song "W.I.L.D." is not indicative of the songs on the album, in that it packs the James Rabbit craziness into a concise, well-structured pop song. I love the exuberant group vocals all over this track, and it captures the album's energy and sense of fun in a bite-sized portion. Perfect Waves is available at Insound, and I highly recommend it for fans of under-the-radar kitchen-sink pop music.
"W.I.L.D." by James Rabbit
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