2 out of 5

Produced by: Steve Wold

Label: Tellous

Biography of Ferns suffer from the “they sound like” disease: there’s not a song you would exclusively define as their own sound, but rather a mash-up of other things you’ve heard at various points.  Mainly 70s-era Clash style punk advanced through the sharp Seattle ear of producer Steve Wold and the influences that locale would bring – think Up Records – and then finally rounding back to some NY trash with a dash of early Sonic Youthy brashness.  The 2 star rating ignores that ‘Merchants’ is a pretty inoffensively listenable album; it’s more about that trying to pick out highs and lows soon exposes that it’s not the most exciting record for something that seemingly bristles with punky sneer.  Lead guy Justin Hamacher has the perfectly innocently eager voice for this kind of stuff, allowing him to swing between the lazy slur of the NY scene and the yelpy passion of Seattle, but similar to the stylistic mish-mash of the music, lyrics rarely emerge from the fray as particularly notable.  ‘Merchants’ works to get you hyped when the group barrels ahead with punky abandon, like on opener ‘Hippy Boredom,’ or the fist-pumping ‘Got to Go,’ but these moments get slowed down by 5 minute exercises in verse-chorus-verse repetition on indie jams like ’45’ or closer ‘Time is Now.’  You can tell that the sloppy energy fueling the disc would really work live, but there’s just not enough of a unique identity at any particular moment to move the disc into the keeper pile.