Here's an intriguing idea: You're a mostly instrumental indie rock band that's been slaving under the radar for years, respected by a few critics and beloved by a small cadre of fans. Either out of boredom, commercial desperation, creative whimsy, or whatever, you invite several of your musical cohorts-- some very well known, others relatively obscure-- and ask them to remix and reinterpret some of your tracks and add their own distinctive words and voices. You then release it as part career retrospective, part self-tribute album, part remix album, part self-reinvention, part out-there musical experimentation.
That's the concept behind The Six Parts Seven's new album, Lost Notes from Forgotten Songs, which features artists like Iron & Wine's Sam Beam, Modest Mouse's Isaac Brock, Centro-Matic's Will Johnson, and Pall Jenkins of The Black Heart Procession reworking and remaking songs mostly from The Six Parts Seven's album Things Shaped in Passing. On paper, it all sounds at the very least interesting, and for the most part, the album offers a bizarro-world refraction of the band's quiet, contemplative instrumental art-rock.
Even more compelling than the idea, however, is how it plays out-- namely, the absence of a discernible formula or pattern from song to song. For instance, a track's effectiveness is not tied to its length. Sam Beam's sparkling "Sleeping Diagonally" is not quite 2\xBD minutes long, but that's all it takes for him to claim the song as his own. Conversely, Brian Straw's "Now Like Photographs" is epic in comparison, approximately five times longer, and his dark, desperate vocals make a perfect counterpart to the binary code banjos that fill the six-minute coda.
A carefully crafted song like Isaac Brock's slow-to-still "From California to Houston, on Lightspeed" can work well against The Six Parts Seven's free-floating sound, but not always, as Pedro the Lion frontman Dave Bazan's "A Blueprint of Something Never Finished" flatly proves. On the other hand, some songs sound impromptu, as if their singers made them up on the spot. This approach lends tracks like Will Johnson's "Song of Impossible Things" a fragile urgency, but a few, like Pall Jenkins' "Seems Like Most Everything Used to Be Something Else", don't lead anywhere at all, finishing at about the same place they started.
Katie Eastburn is the only singer who purposefully tries to break the subdued mood-- apropos of nothing, she literally screams her vocals on "Cold Things Never Catch Fire". Not that she has to maintain any specific atmosphere or approach, but her wailing vents no steam and communicates no emotion, striking instead as tackily self-indulgent.
If The Six Parts Seven routinely emphasize the patient development of musical ideas and the interplay between instruments over traditionally structured songs, this album steers them into newer territory. Still, with the emphasis on the voices and not the sounds, on personalities but not on lyrics, Lost Notes from Forgotten Songs sounds more like a hodgepodge mixtape than a cohesive album.
