EmptyMansions is the result of Sam Fogarino discovering his songwriting muse during downtime at his day gig. Common story, except Fogarino is best known as the drummer of Interpol, a band who in their own words owe their success to the serendipitous combination of four people with complementary strengths and weaknesses. Daniel Kessler wasn’t much of a singer, but had an innate gift for sonorous guitar layering and handling the day-to-day business affairs of a band. Carlos Dengler had little interest in that, though his scything basslines and flamboyant public persona would become equally definitive for Interpol. Meanwhile, Paul Banks made the crucial shift from emotive singer-songwriter to cryptic shouter-seducer by tailoring his voice to the physical limitations of the band’s cramped New York rehearsal space. The final addition of Fogarino really put things in motion; nearly a decade older than the rest of the band, he brought an inimitable instrumental swagger as well as a necessary veteran presence and the enthusiasm of a rock n’ roll lifer who finally found his dream job. He’d been a consummate team player in the years since, so if taking the frontman role in 2013 feels as jarring as, say, Paul Banks making a hip-hop mixtape, unfortunately, the results aren’t much better.
Safe to say the one thing snakes/vultures/sulfate has in common with Everyone on My Dick Like They Supposed to Be is its defining flaw: you can’t doubt the zeal or sincerity of its creator, but this new setting requires an entirely different skill set than the one they’ve established, and there's almost no transferral between the two. The combination leads to, at best, a white-knuckle grasp on competency. While spirited punk incompetency might’ve been preferable in hindsight, any band that features Fogarino on drums is at least guaranteed to sound professional, and would be similarly lucky to have anyone else here involved-- Fogarino enlisted the help of Jesus Lizard’s Duane Denison and Interpol touring member Brandon Curtis, formerly of the Secret Machines, one of the few mainstream bands that could match Interpol’s mighty low end in the early 2000s.
And yet, the trio unlearns everything that distinguished them as instrumentalists on snakes, ending up with something that’s more entertaining when seen as a potential document of alternate history. It’s very easy to envision EmptyMansions as a band that might have been hastily slapped together right after the Jesus Lizard's Shot flopped and before Curtis and Fogarino found their own success. It sounds like radio-ready alt-rock ca. 1996-- so, post-grunge. Which means in practice, it’s nothing but craggy vocals, meaty riffs served medium-well, plodding rhythms, implicit Pixies worship and explicit Neil Young worship; it ends with a cover of “Down by the River” all of things. Besides hooks or any sort of spark, all that’s missing is a one-album record deal with DGC and an ill-fated tour with the Toadies.
That these three guys can’t even come up with any memorable instrumental moments is baffling enough, but the musical basis for EmptyMansions aims low as if that's the only difficulty level Fogarino can handle as a singer right now. He doesn’t make a total faceplant, though the dominant emotion I get from listening to snakes is empathy. You might feel similarly if you’ve ever tried to write songs and quickly realized your inability to perform them. All eight tracks on snakes find Fogarino using a newbie’s cheat codes on the mic: When it’s audible, he affects a Frank Black drawl (“That Man” actually namedrops him) that’s ostensibly meant to add intrigue to otherwise placeholder lines, but more often serves as a way to avoid committing to the demands of melody. Listening to the off-key chorus of “Lyra”, it’s easy to see why he’d go that route. Otherwise, Fogarino cloaks himself with flange effects or simply buries himself in the mix so the song that’s supposedly inspired by Justified (“Up in the Holler”) is interchangeable with the one that takes its cues from Hubert Selby, Jr. ("Sulfate") or the one that was written by another man nearly four decades ago.
While Fogarino’s tentative performance spares him embarrassment, you wonder why he’s holding back when the mere act of releasing this record is ballsy as hell. At this juncture, making snakes was likely its own reward and it’s hard to imagine Fogarino plotting a Foo Fighters-style exit strategy. But in a strange way, snakes/vultures/sulfate is a record worth hearing because it serves as a reminder of the vast distance between inspiration and artistic realization; writing a good song is extremely hard, capable singers are rare, and compelling frontmen even more so. So EmptyMansions serve as a crossover to a real underground, that is, the 99% represented by bands that are equally competent, anonymous, and ultimately ignored, the sort of music resulting in lonely SoundClouds, sparsely attended bar gigs, and promo emails that are immediately deleted because the guy who played drums on Turn on the Bright Lights had absolutely nothing to do with it.
