Somewhere in my small but wildly varied assortment of LPs, I have this album by English-by-way-of-Germany prog-rockers Nektar called A Tab in the Ocean, which has some seriously ugly cover art (a green decaying man-woman taking hits from a celestial bong on a, well... I suppose it's a tab in the ocean) and contains songs that, for all their effort to sound otherwise, can't help being pop, even when they're drawn out to fill the whole side of a record and smothered with obtuse, fantastical lyrics and tiresome organ recitals. I'm reminded of this record, of course, by Ringodom or Proctor, the ambitiously weird, but still gloriously accessible debut from Head of Femur, a Chicago-based band of Nebraska natives featuring Mike Elsener of Solar Wind, Ben Armstrong of Commander Venus, and Matt Focht of Bright Eyes.
The trio and their vast cast of co-conspirators run The Beach Boys and Caravan through an Elephant Six meatgrinder and wind up with eleven oddball chamber-pop suites full of left turns, ambitious orchestration, and music box explosions of melody. Producer AJ Mogis (The Faint, Get Up Kids, Mayday) has his hands full throughout, balancing top-heavy verses containing multiple vocal tracks and a motley assortment of violins, French horns, flutes and keyboards with minimal interludes of creaking harmonies and repetitive percussion or accordion patterns. In terms of scope, it resembles Ween's The Mollusk without all the bathroom humor; it even bursts into the occasional sea shanty.
Opener "January on Strike" swerves from an almost industrial rhythmic assault into a slow, majestic passage that drifts into a buildup that finally deposits you in the propulsive opening verse of "Curve That Byrd". The loopy bassline and big three-part harmonies make for a colossal hook, and the song returns to this structure after several detours, including an anthemic guitar passage backed by marimba, and a huge violin-drenched chorus that features four interlocking vocal parts. That's a ton of stuff to absorb in the space of about six minutes, which is apparently just the way the band likes it-- every one of their songs includes at least three distinct sections and usually a couple of tempo changes.
"Yeoman or Tinker" runs through strange sections that sound like a room full of clocks, buckles under the weight of massive horn and string bombast, and cools off with harmonies and piano, while "Acme: The Summit of a Mountain" is a boisterous anthem for kids who feel pressured into attending institutions in which they have no interest, like summer camp and tech school. It's probably the most straightforward rock song here, though it's got nothing on the sunshiny dancepop of "Science Needed a Medical Man", a bell-and-horn-dappled blast of melody about the return of the first man to travel at the speed of light to Earth, and his subsequent death from the strain.
Where Head of Femur finally differ the most from an old band like Nektar is the fact that they embrace their pop core, no matter how much prog apple they pile on around it. Ringodom or Proctor certainly has its flaws-- plenty of lyrics that sound too much like placeholders, and arrangements that sometimes get too opaque are the two most worthy of note-- but for a band just starting out, it's an impressive statement of purpose, and the tease of waiting to see if they can refine and sharpen this sound for a second go round is overwhelming. Head of Femur definitely bear watching in the future.
