Dan Friel - Total Folklore
- Written by Aaron Wolfson
Dan Friel opens Total Folklore with a near-13-minute track titled after a James Joyce novel -- which begins with an ear-splitting three-second peal. This kind of full-volume brusqueness is a carry-over from Friel’s days in the noise band Parts & Labor. Only now, instead of playing boring old guitars, his aural assaults traffic in myriads of electro-gadgets running through distortion pedals galore.
'Ulysses' continues with multiple keyboard riffs playfully weaving in and out of each other, over the top of a catchy low-register hip hop bass beat. As the track winds its way prog-style through a medley of electronic fuzz crescendos, Friel drops the break beat from the mix to exalt in the rapture of his dense melodies. You won’t find any choruses here. This romp makes up a third of Total Folklore – listening to it is like summiting a jagged, dangerous mountain called Ulysses, and during the rest of the album, you careen down the opposite slope via a slippery slide. The pace is that of a missile mid-flight, and aside from three brief intermissions, it never lets up. Often the complexity and abrasive rhythms, like on the mathy 'Velocipede', resemble what might happen if an entire hospital wing’s monitoring devices broke out spontaneously into song.
Other highlights include the playful 'Landslide' and the frenetic 'Badlands', an album-closing note even more hectic than the one on which it began. And it must be mentioned that the intermissions are sneaky-good soundscapes that act as much-welcome resting places. Without these, Total Folklore would be struggling to transition from half-mad ('Scavenger') into epileptic ('Thumper') without giving you a serious headache.
The album isn’t without its weaker points. The primary melody in each track seems to occupy the same pitch – a mid-register drone that starts to sound whiny after a while, or rather like a child’s toy keyboard, especially on 'Valedictorian' (from Friel’s previous Valedictorian/Exoskeleton EP).
One might suspect that Friel is making club music for metalheads. It may be louder than bombs, but it’s also infinitely danceable – despite all the layers at work here, the time signatures are readily apparent and the beats propel you through the wondrous walls of sound. If you can handle the sonic onslaught, that is to say, there’s something for you here.
Total Folklore is out now and available from amazon and via iTunes.