Back in 2007, the easy literary comparison for me to make with Patrick Watson's out-of-nowhere Polaris-pinching Close to Paradise was Peter Pan. Like the ship in a jar that decorates the album cover, Paradise was a fantastical world in miniature, intricately detailed and designed to evoke imaginative flights of fancy. It was also too ethereal: all flying and no destination. A year and a half later, Watson is back with his third album, Wooden Arms, and not much has changed. He's still waiting to sweep us from our bedroom windows and show us a wonderful world that exists in the realm of the fantastic, his voice is still cartoonishly woozy and antique-sounding (part Jeff Buckley, but also M. Ward and Devendra Banhart), and his music still sounds like an ultra-busy score for a highbrow children's book or a whimsical silent film. And the same vexing problem keeps arising: When the band isn't making music that operates under a frustrating dream logic, they're, well, lulling me to sleep.
Wooden even features a song called "Where the Wild Things Are", which should surprise no one. Watson, still inextricable from the liminal state between dreaming and waking life, wrote the piece as an homage to his favorite book as a child, with the knowledge that Spike Jonze was adapting the book for an upcoming film. The song's light, apprehensive piano and foreboding pizzicato strings do have the feel of a score (Watson actually sent it to Jonze on a lark). Too bad it's meant to stand on its own on Wooden, because it doesn't do much without a proper cinematic referent. Watson's simplistic, light-headed incantations-- "I go to where the wild things are"-- aren't exactly transfixing, and the arrangement as a whole bogs down in pre-bedtime sleepiness on its way to dreamland.
Elsewhere, Wooden marks an ever-so-slight shift in approach. Specifically, the album's classicist leanings are cut with a more "organic" vibe, which too often emerges sounding like a group of classically-trained buskers than what they seemed to be aiming toward: Elvis Perkins, or maybe Grizzly Bear. "Beijing" promises to deliver "the sound of the city" (or so Watson's hazy refrain would have us believe), but the song's lasting image is its percussion, a hyperactive hodgepodge of clanking metals that does no favors to the competing mellow tone of the piece. The same goes for the preceding number "Tracy's Waters", which buries a simple melody under layers of floor toms, tinkling doodads, and sappy strings. "Down at the Beach" is downright frustrating in its lack of structure or motivation, moving from nervous strings to a wholly unearned post-rock style mid-song crescendo, and ending with a brooding piano atop more far-off clickety-clack. I've no idea how the band creates its music, but I have the suspicion that if I hired Patrick Watson (again, the name of the collective and its leader) to build my home, I would expect to get the dining room wallpaper and front-porch trimwork plans first.
Patrick Watson doesn't do foundation work exceedingly well. Yet this is not to say that there aren't moments on Wooden that suggest songcraft was the foremost urge. The title track is a sweet little lullaby (something that, despite his faults as a songwriter, Watson does pretty well) crafted mainly from a standup bassline and piano, with even the extraneous noises glossing as little pitter-pats. "Big Bird in a Small Cage" starts as another anxious piano piece, but detours after the first verse into a country duet, featuring Katie Moore, whose high quaver suggests a young Dolly Parton. "Big Bird" does have its unnecessary additions-- do we really need all those Beach Boys-ish "ba ba ba"s?-- but at least it works from a somewhat solid melodic structure, so that breaks from it are always referencing something firm. On an album comprised of so many left turns, it's one of the few unexpected moments that registers as a welcome surprise.
