As part of San Francisco’s short lived but highly impressive Girls, impressive young songwriter and guitarist Christopher Owens came on like a house afire, weaned on classic pop yet connecting as very much of the nonce, a combo that resulted in his name being heralded far and wide as a major artist. Owens quit Girls in July of last year, but not with the intention of leaving the music scene. His first record as a solo artist is Lysandre, an ambitious project that concerns a very familiar occurrence; he met a girl. Unfortunately, the record is plagued with problems, and is a far from auspicious beginning to his solo career.
In Girls, Christopher Owens made a solid statement regarding the durability of the tried and true strains of pop-rock song craft. His writing, which was snuggly tied to the past while lacking in heavy indebtedness to the impressiveness of his influences, integrated with his sharp guitar playing and sturdy if somewhat emotionally raw vocalizing to vindicate the hubbub from the expected accusations of hype.
While Girls first hit the radar screens with the “Lust for Life” b/w “Morning Light” single for the True Panther Sounds label in 2008, the stir over the band, which was mainly comprised of Owens, bassist/producer Chet “J.R.” White, and a revolving door of other members really began in earnest with the release of Album in the autumn of the following year. That record stood up as quite the debut for the group, and the lively and assured guitar-pop strains it presented brought a high benchmark for their subsequent activity.
It was an obstacle that Girls largely licked, first with the “Broken Dreams Club” EP from 2010, a collection of six songs that displayed substantial songwriting growth and frequent use of horns and pedal steel, additives that found the group coming off at times like a cross between a less ethnic-music themed Beirut and the later, less ragged material from Bright Eyes.
Then roughly a year later came Father, Son, Holy Ghost, a full-length that held flashes of everything from Pink Floyd circa Dark Side, Neil Young, Jonathan Richman, Teenage Fanclub, early Squeeze, Dinosaur Jr. and even early ‘70s Deep Purple, all without feeling schizophrenic. No, not all the ingredients in this bouillabaisse worked equally well. In fact, the record’s ultimate triumph over the dangers of the sophomore slump revealed that Owens was at his best when indulging in his weird side rather than going full-blown accessible.
Owens’ stated reason for leaving and effectively ending Girls was due to the his disappointment in that swinging door membership, a situation that saw 21 different participants enter and leave the picture and effectively rendering Girls as a tandem of Owens and White rather than an actual band. The decision to quit basically reinforced Owens as a heart on the sleeve type of guy and a person very much motivated by the emotional content of his lyrics, but what was refreshing about Girls was that the music was just as concerned with form. So striking out alone presented the opportunity to see if that attention to diversity and detail would be retained when not working with another constant instrumental cohort and additionally a recurring strong producer (their post-Album material was helmed by Doug Boehm).
And here comes his solo debut Lysandre to answer that very question. The result is that Owens, in creating a song cycle concerning the first Girls tour in 2008 and his romance with a woman he met in France whose name provides the album with its title, is quite attentive to purely musical aspects of his total package. The problem is that the record is also something of a mess.
Retained from Girls is the employment of Boehm as producer, and the result is a record that’s sonic qualities are to say the least, maximal. It’s hard to name a current indie artist less interested in displaying any ties to punk or low-fi attitudes than Owens. Brief opener “Lysandre’s Theme” is an airy, flute-driven ode to chamber pop, and the LP also features a saxophone that reeks of the studio-musician professionalism that hit its apex (or its nadir, if you prefer) in the second half of the ‘70s.
That saxophone is emblematic of the first of Lysandre’s compound problems. While the horn player does get in a short honking solo toward the end of third track “New York City,” the overall use of the instrument is indicative of Owens’ far too frequent indulgence in a sound that is best described as a soft-rock journey down the Middle of the Road.
It’s not that a retrospective interest in this generally disdained genre can’t be successfully explored (see Destroyer’s excellent Kaputt for evidence), but Owens doesn’t really seem interested in exploring its potential, choosing instead to simply bask in the music’s lack of depth and power as part of the record’s concept. And to be clear, this development didn’t exactly come from left field. Father, Son, Holy Ghost also held moments that brought to mind the soft-rockin’ ‘70s, but they were ultimately fleeting in that album’s scheme of things.
Still, this more assertive engagement with the soft-rock/MOR template might’ve actually managed to barely succeed if Owens actually possessed some of the light (or should that be lite?) loopiness of the Seals and Crofts that came up with “Summer Breeze” or the chutzpah of the Boz Scaggs who produced “Lowdown” and “Lido Shuffle.” Unfortunately he doesn’t.
And that’s the burden of Lysandre’s low-point, “Riviera Rock.” With its fake reggae rhythmic base, sax in overwrought smoldering mode, and use of a slinky femme vocal group (they can’t really be described as backing singers because they’re not actually backing anybody; Owens doesn’t sing on the track) given nothing to do but repeat the song’s title too many times, it quickly acquires the aura of an ultra-saccharine band that specializes in weekend gigs at a wildly popular and terribly overpriced bar and grill where singles gather to meet and mingle. So in a nutshell, it’s something of an endurance test.
Yes, it’s clear that this atmosphere was deliberate if not necessarily “ironic” (though it could be that as well). And if Lysandre’s concept was stronger, this descent into the dorky could’ve possibly worked. But Owens’ ambitions here, while admirable, aren’t really all that impressive (more on that a little farther down).
What’s more, his predilection for soft-rock actually crosses over and detracts from the normally high standard of his songs/lyrics, with the following cut “Love is in the Ear of the Listener” shooting for the sort of singer-songwriter zone that once upon a time was enthused over as quirky and candid, but in reality was far too often merely cutesy and overly clever. It’s troublesome that a song where Owens questions his talent comes perilously close to being an outright dud.
But after consideration the biggest problem with Lysandre is how highly erratic it is as an actual album experience. There is a small handful of good songs here (the chamber-pop/’60s bubblegum of “Lysandre” being the best, the foofy flute-kissed faux-hippie-isms of “Here We Go” coming in as runner up), but they are left stranded without any momentum or in its absence, thematic spark.
While the quality of track-to-track progression that gets referred to as “flow” is by no means a prerequisite for a successful LP, if you’re going to bail on forward movement then it should be replaced with other elements that serve to capture the listener’s attention, the most common avenue being the investigation of top-flight material. Yes, a few songs do stand out individually, but Lysandre as a whole is far from Owens’ best batch of tunes. And the ten pieces here, while obviously intended to tell a story, lack tension as they proceed. There is logic, but it fails in retaining energy.
It would’ve probably betrayed the purity of Owens’ idea, but perhaps integrating additional songs conceived from outside Lysandre’s thematic framework into the mix would’ve increased its success as an LP. Clocking in at less than thirty minutes, the record certainly has room for them. Sometimes less is more, but the brevity here feels anemic (“Broken Dreams Club” is longer, and that one’s considered an EP) and the otherwise not bad country-folk closer “Part of Me (Lysandre’s Epilogue)” ends the record rather abruptly.
It seems that Owens’ conceptual aims have simply gotten the better of his musical judgment. And not to pile on, but the concept has further problems in relating its import. “Lysandre’s Theme,” which sounded sprightly and intriguing upon first listen, gets repeated throughout the album to the point where it begins to register as trite and overly familiar, the strengths of its opening stanza subsiding upon additional listens.
Also, “Here We Go Again” closes with the captured audio of a stewardess and then a jet taking off. The following cut, the previously derided “Riviera Rock,” opens with the sound of ocean tide. This sort of blatant, heavy-handed narrative assist is exactly what the great concept albums, for one example Eno’s Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), avoid. But Lysandre’s lack of subtlety is a minor issue compared to the problems outlined above.
And yet it becomes perfectly clear that Lysandre is exactly the record Christopher Owens wanted to make, its faults not being due to oversight or accident, but rather existing as a conscious part of its problematic design. It’s not a sloppy record or one pointing to a loss of talent, but simply an LP overloaded with questionable decisions. And in that, there is some consolation.
It would be inaccurate and insulting to Owens to surmise that he should simply return to the relative simplicity of “Lust for Life” or the songs that comprised Album. The great stuff on Father, Son, Holy Ghost made it obvious that he could channel the large scope of his ideas quite successfully. No, there’s really no turning back. Lysandre is a derailment in Owens’ development, but it shouldn’t be too difficult for him to get it all back on track.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
D
