San Francisco's Zmrzlina play everything. Well, they sound like they're trying to play everything, anyway. I don't mean to say that the music is necessarily jumbled-- they generally avoid the postmodern pitfall of cramming a hundred ideas into one song. Instead, this band takes a few dozen ideas, catalogs them, and creates lots of little postcards to paste into their album. Only the postcards are the songs (except when they're actually cards, like the inserts that come with this album), and the eclectic ideas seem either ill-suited to the band's strengths (hazy psyche-pop, as far as I can tell) or simply beyond the range of their abilities to pull off. And while I admire any band willing to bring a little eclecticism to the mix, what I hear as the failure to cover bases set forth in the music is a disappointment.
Katastrophe Vol. 3 is Zmrzlina's third release. I should give my respects to whoever designed the packaging, because it's rather amazing. All futuristic art-deco and matte coloring, and featuring the aforementioned card inserts-- this is a project I imagine as much thought went into as the actual recordings. In fact, I wonder how a band like this even has enough cash to create something like this, as publishing houses and art directors don't often come cheaply. Design is credited to the group, so perhaps somebody internal had access to a printing press and some serious Adobe skills. So, in summary, props to the designers.
As for the music, well, it's nothing if not good-natured. Yet it's often amateurish where it should be accomplished, rough where it should be smooth, and goofy where it should be strange. The first track, "Supermarket Radio," begins promisingly enough with some eerie strings and a looped child(-like?) vocal. This is nice, something of a cross between Bernard Herrmann and Björk, but the song doesn't actually begin until the band enters about a minute in. Disco drums and some wah-wah guitar introduce the "groove," and then everyone drops a mad Blondie beat so vocalist Jeff Ray can expound Fred Schneider style upon who knows what atrocities. There's a running string-line throughout, and the band occasionally returns to the opening neatness. However, I get the feeling that this is the kind of music that sounds better when you have a million bucks to fly a producer in from Iceland to clean up your mix and get a decent drum sound. What it could be: high-gloss transient art-pop; what it is: flat, aimless upstart pop.
Elsewhere, on "Schoolgirls," drummer/vocalist Heather Snider lends a gentle, airy lead to some fairly dull (where they should be punchy) strains. The arrangement combines a terribly "bouncy" drum loop, laidback guitar strumming and a whipping violin line, thereby prompting me to play rock-critic and call this "what folk-pop means in the 21st Century" or possibly "folktronica." But that game sucks, and in fact, this tune just sounds unfocused, ending with a long guitar solo that wouldn't have sounded out of place at Lynyrd Skynyrd show.
There are cool parts, too: "Creek Lullaby" gets the down-home groove right with some nice guitar picking and a relaxed beat, even managing to throw in a disorienting vocal loop. The song is perfect for a light buzz, and it helps that the band doesn't stretch out this concept so long that I lose interest (which they do quite often on the rest of the album). "Kentucky," which features more of the annoying talk-singing from the first tune, manages to be too long and yet not dull in the slightest. I give credit to Ralph Carney's moaning woodwinds (on loan from Tom Waits' band), and the fact that the stone-somber vibe I get from this tune suits Zmrzlina to a tee. I'm telling you, if they put out an album of all psychedelic funeral marches, I'd buy it and like it.
Those are the high points on an album I would say is at least a few edits and/or omissions shy of something consistently interesting. It's not that Zmrzlina aren't creative; for all I know, they're all great artists on the verge of the next big movement in rock. But there comes a time when your grasp has to keep up with your reach if you want to inspire. Of course, this doesn't happen everyday for artists, but when it does, people take notice and new classics are born. Perhaps, Katastrophe Vol. 3 is just a stepping stone to future greatness, or maybe just a misstep altogether. Everything they're doing could be nice, given different contexts, but sometimes just everything isn't enough.
