There are bedroom recordings, and then there's Echoboy's Giraffe-- the DIY equivalent of the $41 burger at Manhattan's Old Homestead steakhouse. Every ingredient is classed up: you get Kobe beef, arugula instead of lowly lettuce-- they even work truffles into the equation, somehow. But in the end it's still a burger, dominated by the fundamentally proletarian pairing of meat and bread. It's not even a very good burger, and neither should it be: you pay to taste the money you just spent.
Echoboy takes just about every British musical invention of the last two decades and reduces it to an indication of good taste. Over the course of the album, direct quotes from myriad Great Sources float in and out of the speakers, ushered by the infamous Flood (the producer who made Depeche Mode sound like U2 and the Smashing Pumpkins sound like Depeche Mode). But hiding below layers of dated synth noise, dinky drum machines and expensive effects is, surprise surprise, a solo bedroom recording. 50 minutes of structured wankery, as performed by a lone Brit with the questionable talent to put a chorus to a verse, employing a thin, laddish vocal and rudimentary guitar skills.
"Automatic Eyes" is the ultimate all-things-to-all-people single, owing its prolonged-orgasm dynamic to New Order, its bass melody to Blur and its vocal line to just about anyone willing to claim it. Thankfully, some songs on Giraffe-- notably "Don't Destroy Me" and "Summer Rhythm"-- aren't quite as naked in their crossover ambitions; in fact, most tend to start out fine in their minimalism, but they gradually head for the toilet as Flood's stratagems take over. Track after track, Echoboy's ideas are reshaped to approximate preexisting sounds: "Wasted Spaces" is U2's "Discotheque" sideways, and "Fun in You" sounds like Depeche Mode (before the song even comes on, really).
I'll grant that some of these tunes put up more of a fight: "Comfort of the Hum" is the closest Echoboy comes to a convincing patchwork quilt, a singalong about the joys of city living; it's a piano-based piece prone to hanging on the 5th chord, before triumphantly resolving into the 1st. "Good on TV" initially dares to present the 'Boy's voice stripped of effects, at least until the punkish chorus: "All that we can do is sit and wait/ For the money to accumulate/ But it's never gonna happen to me/ Cause I don't look good on TV." Forget TV, Echoboy-- worry about how you sound on record.
Only on Giraffe's closing song "Nearly All the Time" does Echoboy allot himself any conceptual breathing room. After the "official" portion of the song ends, careening strings and Mellotron extend the track in the direction of Madchester psychedelia. But almost predictably, it ends at the precise moment it gets interesting, further evidence of how the 'Boy and Flood can't figure good from bad, relying on outside standards to dictate how far they should take anything.
Several critics, in the UK and here, found Echoboy's chaotic borrowings nothing less than revolutionary-- the mere application of electronic vocabulary to conventional song structure, for instance, struck my colleague at PopMatters as fresh. Personally, I find another reaction more telling: in the ultimate backhanded compliment, another thieving magpie-- Noel Gallagher-- reportedly offered Echoboy a job with Oasis.
