Full disclosure: It's easy conjuring musical comparisons when there's a handy "sounds like" box on an artist's myspace. Wax Tailor, a French musician, composer, and beat conductor in the mold of Rjd2 or Portishead's Geoff Barrow, has a page on which he lists a handful of golden age hip-hop artists, jazz giants, soul singers, and soundtrack innovators as his influences. That's Tales of Forgotten Melodies' gamut. Genre-melding and cinematic is what he'd like us to say. So we'll bite: His album sounds like a movie. An occasionally disjointed movie with clearer intentions than it originally lets on (think Mulholland Falls, not Mulholland Drive), but still a movie.
Wax Tailor samples quite often, from producer standby Galt MacDermot's "And He Will Not Come Again" to dialogue from Alfred Hitchcock's 1950s version of The Man Who Knew Too Much and the jumble is easy headphones music. I've accomplished plenty of work listening to it this week. Thing is, it never really finds its footing. Wax appears to be searching for slivers and slices of space, which are chopped into interludes into which he can slide his favorite sounds-- sounds that likely recall important visual moments for him. I love Woody Allen's nebbishy purr as much as the next guy. But it's still a musical crutch on Forgotten Melodies, now being released in the states after success in Europe last year.
Many of the songs that fall between these curios are orchestral numbers, some produced live by French cellist Marina Quaisse, and better than average. "Hypnosis Theme" features a downtempo lull until Tailor drops an odd rhythm under Quaisse's cello. "Our Dance" mystifyingly opens with a sample of Björk's speaking voice, only to disappoint when breathy Charlotte Savary takes over on vocals. "Walk the Line", a song about music's impulsive power, swells with violin stabs and lugubrious trumpets. The Others, a North Carolina rap trio, are featured on the track and acquit themselves reasonably well, though they seem intent on dropping "Wax Tailor" into every verse, a strange tic. "How I Feel" straight-up jacks the vocals from Nina Simone's ever-arresting "Feelin' Good" and laces them over the softest, most amateur beat on the album, a sleepy collection of delicate pangs and brass. It's the truest indictment of this album's flaws.
Wax Tailor is a beat star in his native France and his earnest (if mediocre, idea-wise) album fits snugly into his country's history of lazily gorgeous pop notables. Though one suspects the scads of American dialogue and EPMD-sampling have him yearning for something a bit closer to the states. Though you may notice there are several Americans among his 831 virtual friends. Thank God, for myspace, right?
