There's so much to discuss about Head of Femur's sophomore album, Hysterical Stars, that it's difficult to know where to begin. For starters, the trio employs 27 guest musicians on these 13 tracks, and every song is packed to the gills with sounds and melodies and countermelodies and detours and left-turn movements. It's maximalism in the extreme-- and with barely time to breathe between brass charts, peals of synthesizer, elaborate string parts, and big three-part harmonies, it's easy to get lost in the labyrinthine arrangements.
Additionally, the album fits nicely alongside the Fiery Furnaces' Blueberry Boat and Architecture in Helsinki's In Case We Die in a recent string of albums that might best be described as "hyperprog": The entire record plays as a long, winding suite, where one crazy idea never has to wait long to meet its match, and songs explode into headlong gallops only to capitulate seconds later into fluttering orchestral passages or odd accordion solos. As with all hyperprog outings, short attention spans are likely to enjoy the album's grab-bag nature, while big-picture people will appreciate the great unified sweep of it all.
Head of Femur don't wait long to posit their more-is-more theory, kicking down the door to their technicolor world with "Elliott Gould Is in California Split", a song that makes their jam-packed 2003 debut Ringodom or Proctor seem restrained by comparison. Super Furry harmonies and taut basslines weave through a teeming forest of violins, glockenspiels, trumpets, and jittery guitars, spilling into rock passages that sound like a hundred different Beach Boys ringtones going off simultaneously. A track bearing the title of their previous album follows, swooping in with baroque strings, wild horns, XTC-ish guitars, and falsetto oohing and aahing. In fact, it goes through so many different sections, the band could probably have made six songs out of it. But then, that seems to be the point.
In the midst of all the marching-band-in-a-penny-arcade madness there are a few songs that step back a (little) bit from the brink of aural overload and show the band for the skilled tunesmiths they are. "Skirts Are Takin' Over" is an oceanic ballad anchored by piano and mellotron, limiting horns and other instruments to broad textural strokes. Likewise, "Easy Street" is loaded with all manner of instrumentation, focused into one solidly conventional pop song with laser-like efficiency. "Oh You're Blue" boasts an amazing string arrangement that segues seamlessly into a rococo orchestral passage. And of course, it splits off into several other directions from there, all of which is better listened to than described.
Hysterical Stars closes on its most majestic note with "Jack and the Water Buffalo", a song that descends from fairly dry, modest beginnings into a cavernous, reverb-drenched second half, aided by brooding cello and a fantastic piano part. It basically takes five minutes to achieve what most of the songs on the album accomplish in half that time, but in doing so lays bare the incredible amount of craft this album must have taken to assemble. Even the album's greatest failure (the ponderous, nonsensical, and ultimately annoying "Sausage Canoe") is intricately and intelligently arranged. There are so many elements to mentally catalog that the first listen is a severe shock to the senses, a musical equivalent of what Dorothy might have felt like when first stepping out of her house into Oz.
