3 out of 5

Label: Secretly Canadian

Producer: Dave Fischoff

Y’know, I sat on all three of Fischoff’s Secretly Canadian albums for a while.  Initially it was because of my dedication to the label, sure, but when I fell out of love with the Bloomington beast (when it crossed into Matador-ish territory of magazine-cover grabs), Fischoff’s trinity were amongst the recordings I kept.  Why?  I would continually rotate them into my ‘to sell’ pile, which I generally attempt to give one more spin before they go, and then they would wander back into my collection.  But once they were there again, I only ever listened to them when they fell into that same rotation…  So eventually I accepted that I was just never going to listen to the damn things, and fie to the lot.

Listen to ‘The Crawl’ with a bit more dedication (pumped into headphones, letting it spin on repeat 3 or 4 times), I think the picture is a little clearer.  There was some to-do about how Fischoff’s first two albums were pieced together from found sound, and the recordings were testaments to that – lovely tape hisses and ambient background noises fluttering in and out as Fischoff mumbles in his weirdly child-like yet gravely voice atop some key or guitar work which attempt to add melody to the proceedings.  They were pretty quiet albums, with quiet and dark album art.  They seemed to offer a sense of foreboding in their construction.

‘The Crawl’ was a step toward liveliness, Fischoff apparently getting inspired by – ahem – hip-hop (hardly) to ditch the found sound in favor of electronic scribbly-do beats.  What’s produced is something like Postal Service, but with the awesomely fuzzy production quality that’s carried over from the tape stuff, giving it a pretty unique sound, especially when Fischoff layers his monotone throaty vocals 7 or 8 times atop the noise.  And hey, lyric sheet, what do we have here… is it… is it high school poetry?  Where every other line rhymes?  Yes, I’m afraid it is.  Fischoff’s tales match the workaday composition of his albums, stumbling through typical cynical and sad tropes, but they go beyond being the norm to being completely mundane, and therein lies the key to why I never listened to these things.  I like the idea of Fischoff’s albums, and I like his instrumental work.  The first two albums didn’t really offer enough meat to merit re-listens, but The Crawl admittedly has some pretty awesome tunes, and even though that ‘hip-hop’ song is out of place, it too finds a unique blend of live and manipulated sounds, all scuzzed up under that interesting production quality, to make for a good core to a song.  But then Fischoff comes in and manages to make us twiddle our thumbs with lines like “I knew a woman / I kissed her thigh / I watched my time grow / inside her eye.”  Yeah, bra-fucking-vo, and there’s just no feeling behind it to me.  It’s like words were penned just because it seemed like there needed to be words.  And there didn’t need to be.  Like maybe I would’ve listened to this as an instrumental album, but maybe I’ll never listen to it as singer-songwriter pap.

But let’s let it be said that I find a lot of lyricists wanting, especially in that Postal Service / Shins crowd to which ‘The Crawl’ could’ve played well if Dave was a bit cutesier with his singing.  So I like that he kept his style, and I like the overall sorta lonely, moody feel and look to things, and I really do like the music here (though let’s qualify that by saying that stripped of vocals, I would hope the compositions would shift and grow to compensate).  But beneath the presentation, Fischoff’s final (I think?) album doesn’t have much to offer.