There's a state of mind in which infancy and mortality meet. Death, its inexorability, and our fear of it render us as helpless as when we were toddlers. Many of us fill the resulting tremulous mental gap with religion ("our Father..."); others with work, love, or grown-up childishness like golf; and you and I, perhaps, with pop music. Cloud Cult bandleader Craig Minowa is obsessed with this space-- with infancy, mortality, and, alas, infant mortality-- and his grandiose fourth album, Advice from the Happy Hippopotamus, occupies it with messy, expansive, computer-ok indie rock.
I'm often captivated by bands that find quirky beauty in modest everyday moments. Cloud Cult do this, too, particularly on last year's Aurora Borealis, but here they more often aim for lofty apotheosis: for The Moon and Antarctica, Odelay, or the Radiohead masterpiece of your choice. Advice from the Happy Hippopotamus is utterly over the top, starting with its title and ridiculous cover art (see also: the name "Cloud Cult"), and those hard souls who don't like it will find it easy to mock. The rest of us will find our crusty, professionally cynical veneers crumbling. Over an intimidatingly vast 25 tracks melding folk, electronics, Arcade Fire emo, and quasi-hippie hoobajoo, Cloud Cult gird their ambition with solid tunes.
It's tempting to call Minowa, an organic farmer from the Minnesota wilds, a kind of insane genius. His voice is equal parts Isaac Brock yelp and Conor Oberst quaver, his CDs made of recycled materials, his home studio geothermally powered. He has the perverse confidence to open Advice with a wordless industrial freakout and bury the album's most accessible song, plaintive acoustic ballad "Bobby's Spacesuit", as a hidden track. Title track "Happy Hippo" buzzes like the Chemical Brothers, twinkles like a fairytale and boinks like a video game before recklessly pilfering from Neil Young's "Hey Hey, My My"-- also, it's about a hippopotamus. ("She lives under my matt-uh-russ.")
The album's sprawl is dizzying: Crystalline Sunny Day Real Estate guitar lines on "What Comes at the End", jaunty banjo'n'beats for "Lucky Today", a Books-like spoken-word near-death-experience on "The Light at the End of the Tunnel", the tearjerker chamber-pop of "Transistor Radio", the dreamlike call and response of "That Man Jumped Out the Window" (replete with dead-on Thom Yorke histrionics on the lyric "There's a fine line between falling and flying"). Like Young's Harvest and Tonight's the Night, Advice also includes a live track, cathartic post-votum depression rocker "Moving to Canada", which is a fitting successor to screeds like "Divide and Conquer" by fellow Minnesotans Hüsker Dü. There's also one song, "Car Crash", with a female lead vocal, delivered somberly by Mara Stemm. The warm Four Tet programming of such tracks as "Washed Your Car" scatters Oberst's Digital Ash like so much cigarette ash (burn!).
Flesh is a recurring theme. Does the human essence persist after its shell breaks down? This question is particularly compelling for Minowa, whose infant son died of unexplained causes in 2002, and whose spirit pervades this record. "My skin is still me, with memories," Minowa sings on "Start New", but "Living on the Outside of Your Skin" attempts to break those surly bonds with toy piano and a growling guitar solo. "What Comes at the End" ponders reunion, reincarnation and "fall[ing] in love in our new skin." The elaborately off-the-cuff "You Got Your Bones to Make a Beat" celebrates existence with the unaffected joy of a dancing toddler.
Like a little boy or a crazed genius, Minowa isn't afraid to look silly as he follows his muse into a bizarrely fascinating fantasy world. One track, "What It Feels Like to Be Alive", consists of Minowa hokily exhorting a concert audience to "show the people of the world that you are alive". Amid the ensuing communal yawp is one unconverted smartass-- a cipher, if you will, for a music scene fraught with carefully cultivated, ultimately unrevealing, laughably insecure projections of "cool"-- who yells back, "I'm dead!" Don't be that guy.
