Jonathan FireEater were well-educated children of privilege playing would-be NYC rock'n'roll stars, sort of like the Strokes of their time, minus the payoff. Not long after a huge record company advance resulted in the bust that was the largely unproven band's Wolf Songs for Lambs, the group went belly-up. Several Jonathan FireEater members went on to form the Walkmen. Singer Stewart Lupton, whose drug use allegedly played a big role in the group's dissolution, went nowhere, dropping out of sight supposedly to continue his poetry studies.
The Walkmen turned out OK, and now Lupton makes a belated return as well with the Childballads. Certainly time away has served to deflate expectations, assuming any residual goodwill or excitement still existed. Further, if Jonathan Fire*Eater specialized in over-blown, dramatic garage rock, the Childballads thankfully tone things down considerably on their debut EP Cheekbone Hollows. Here the biggest touchstone is shambling old school rock'n'roll á la the Rolling Stones or even Bob Dylan at his shaggiest.
The last thing the world needed was more music in this vein, which even if done well frequently comes off frustratingly redundant. Unfortunately, Lupton and the Childballads don't make much of a case for their short slab of more of the same. In its defense, Cheekbone Hollows is just a six-song EP, more a modest sounding board than some grand statement (though perhaps Lupton would beg to differ, given the poetic bent of the lyrics, nonetheless often distractingly slurred and distorted with a bullet mic effect).
What's missing is a sense of excitement, or even a worthy vector for Lupton's submerged words. The shuffling music, mostly acoustic-based if not always strictly acoustic, sounds like a product of a casual guitar-circle get-together, steeped as it is in tried and tested riffs and familiar strums. "They Hunt Us We Run" and "Blackbird Trax" are variations on the same waltz-like theme, and if the self-conscious sloppiness of "Old Man October" and "Laughter from the Rafters" (which cops "Beast of Burden") has its charm, the casual approach robs the songs of any edge or intrigue-- the music's so laid-back it's practically flat.
There is potential here: Some projects arrive DOA and others arrive simply not all quite there. The Childballads fall into the second camp, and minus the almost narcotic aesthetic affectations, Lupton could still very well engage the band into gear rather than simply grind well-trod ideas further into the ground. But if you're going to come back from nowhere, it'd help to have something that even hints you're going somewhere, and Cheekbone Hollows isn't it.
