Fol Chen
Part 1: John Shade, Your Fortune's Made
Asthmatic Kitty
By Jose Fritz
They are the art of pandiculation, the samples of stomping and sitars, of harps, and synthetic cymbals accumulate like snow on the ground and change the entire landscape. Their one-sheet reads like a piece of existential micro-fiction intended only to distract and occupy space. They let the record speak for them. That’s fine. The record is amazing and we’d be all better off if it spoke for us as well.
The record opens bleak and subdued with “The Believers.” French horns drag out morbid celebratory notes over a sedate thump-thump-thumping sounding partly like a frail heart and partly like kicking a cardboard box. It’s a dangerous way to open a record. If it’s not dark out, not cloudy out, not raining and not quiet then the listener might be lost, too distracted to follow the sliding bass notes and the escalation of overdubbed vocals. The song warns “Don’t follow me.” But they do follow that. They continue in triumph for another nine tracks ignoring their own well-intended warning.
Fol Chen audaciously celebrates our American mundacity. The single “Cable TV” is a mix of sitars and hand claps and mellotron. It literally describes an afternoon at a cheap motel. “I just got paid baby, I know a place and they got cable TV / Now here we are by the pool of this motel getting dizzy from the spritzers and the desert heat / I’m getting tired of waiting, fuck the hot tub lets go back to the room and watch some cable TV / Won’t you come away with me, the carpets filthy but the ice is free.” The sad truth is that we are as a whole, mundane, average and unaccomplished so the songs are about us, our excess and shallow attachment to material banality: afternoons on the couch, folding lawn chairs, linoleum, and wall-to-wall carpeting. The most depressing realization for anyone is seeing themselves as average, unaccomplished and mundane. Yet here we are.
In listening it becomes an album of deep album tracks, where your favorite song today isn’t the single, and isn’t the opening cut but is 8 tracks deep and you know all the words. It’s that unexpected vibraphone break in the middle of the big-ass drum beat that draws us in. While your mind is enthralled with the rhythm, or the words they throw out something small appealing and unexpected.
It’s a monkey-trick, like pretending to throw a stick to confuse your dog. It works, and it works every time because in reality you really are mundane but at least smarter than the dog.
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