Album Review : Fan Death - Womb Of Dreams
- Written by Jim Merrett
We’ve all been there – wondered if Dave Grohl has died again this week and ended up three hours later stuck in a never-ending carousel of Wikipedia entries. Criticised for its lack of accuracy (although for reliability, the BBC has it only a gnat’s chuff off the Encyclopedia Britannica – but then, I found that factoid from Wikipedia itself), as “free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual, encyclopedia projects” go (again, lifted from Wikipedia’s entry on itself, which is already some fucked up feedback loop), when it comes to binging on pointless information, it’s a pretty cool resource to have.
Vampire Weekend-supporting Vancouver-via-Brooklyn outfit Fan Death, then, must have been cursing when that list of the fifty most interesting Wikipedia entries was passed around the internet last year. Suddenly their kooky name, not a threat to their over-familiar followers but taken from an urban myth blown up by media scaremongering in Korea (a spate of deaths attributed to leaving an electric fan on overnight, if you don’t know already) didn’t sound so obscure – losing them valuable cool points. No Erol Alkan remix is going to save them from the indignity of that.
Turns out that obscurity isn’t what Fan Death are gunning for. Loading up on more genres than a particularly large branch of Blockbuster Videos (which I guess isn’t saying much) – and taking the view that pop producers are actually the only ones taking risks these days – they seem to have their sights fixed on the charts. This is a pretty slick slice of cosmopolitan disco, but for all the glossy sheen there’s that lingering suspicion that you can’t polish a turd, and if, under the layers of glitter, that’s what this is.
The creeping clutter of strings that greets listeners with Womb Of Dreams’ opener ‘Constellations’ is a star-gazing suggestion that this is going to be epic. It leads into early single ‘Veronica’s Veil’, which is perhaps closer to where the heart of this piece lies. Full of mirrorball pomp, it does it’s best to dress this up as the likely heir to Hercules and Love Affair – if it didn’t come across as a calculated attempt to tap into the Florence and the Machine market.
Indeed, singer Dandilion Wind Opaine (who, with the video to earlier release ‘Cannibal’ to her name, has some right to claim responsibility for the band’s image) has seemingly been groomed with toppling the current indie darling cum pop queen in mind, which is fine as long as you’re comfortable with the feeling that you’re being targeted as a market sector rather than as a person. Her patter is supposed to come across as a sultry purr but grates these ears. By ‘The Best Night of my Life’, the whole affair feels like a set-up date where the other party is revealing Fatal Attraction-levels of interest and you’re trying to size up the nearest exit.
A shame because when they get it right, Fan Death’s brand of exotic Kasbah funk hints at an ability to incinerate dancefloors. But from the get-go, and particularly in the lead track, this feels obviously orchestrated – maybe overly so.