Foma – Inverness

Full disclosure:  It’s been a crap week at the day job.  I was halfway to ditching out completely on a new music review today in favor of writing 1500 words detailing Pavement’s significance in my formative years as a music fan; that would have been easy, requiring no real mental effort, and would have given me more time stew about all of the things that piss me off about my gig.  Sadly, it would also have been boring as hell.  Nobody wants to read about 15 year-old me and how “Range Life” made me feel.  (If I’m wrong on that, let me know and I’ll e-mail you a draft.)  Luckily, the new LP from San Fransisco based Foma has been stuck in my stereo for the last week;  the lushly ornate, vaguely experimental sounds of Inverness are enough to shake me out of my work-induced funk.  While it’s not quite as easy to write about as Pavement, Foma’s second full-length is packed with solid songs and interesting sounds, providing inspiration and motivation, even in this bleak week.  If this wasn’t a good record, I would have been a lazy rock critic today.

The name Foma is a good place to start here; Vonnegut fans are already in on this one, but for the uninitiated, “foma” is a term from the invented religion in Vonnegut’s early masterpiece, Cat’s Cradle; foma are harmless untruths told to soothe the simpleminded.  I’m not going to expend a lot of effort wrapping my head around what it means to name a band Foma, but it’s either a function of blind devotion to an American genius, uber-snobbishness, a stab at a broader meaning or some combination of all three.  In any event, it comes with my stamp of approval; if one person picks up Cat’s Cradle because they like the Foma sound, that’s a mark in the plus column.  Further, this connection to the high culture exemplifies the sonic texture of the record to a degree; this record sounds like it reads books.   (For other Vonnegut fanboys: I kind of want to say that the cover art is a paean to Ice-9, but I’m not sure if that’s a stretch.  Your thoughts?)

Foma lists six musician playing no less than ten instruments on the record (Jeffrey Schmidt – drums, keyboard, voice; Edward M. Burch – voice, guitar, ukulele, keyboard, drums; Chani Hawthorne, bass, voice; Hun Kim, cello; Charith Premawardhana, viola; Isaac Bonnell, guitar) and it consistently sounds like a lot of people are playing a lot of instruments; there are no songs here that aren’t brimming with things to listen to.  The arrangements are often complex, with frequent shifts in tempo and tone and wild, iterative extrapolations on a theme or idea.  “JM Sebastian” opens with nearly two minutes of meandering guitar and string interplay in front of a driving drum beat before breaking into the angelic chorus-like vocal section that closes the song.  The instrumental piece is consistently interesting, with each several measures introducing a new variant on the song’s hook.  The very next track, “Hannah, it’s Finished,” is slightly more traditional, with a more standard vocal structure, but the music behind the singing still loops and spins crazily.  It also gets unexpectedly heavy about halfway through; it shifts from a quiet and intricate half-folk ballad to a swirling, spiralling, crunchy electric guitar freakout before peeling back to pretty piano noodling.  This kind of restless hopping from sound to sound is the thing that makes the album both interesting and endearing.  Foma clearly have a ton of talent and a wide range of influences, resulting in a record that’s both well-crafted and unpredictable.

There are eight tracks on Inverness, clocking in at a relatively blistering twenty-eight minutes.  While there’s a lot going on, it doesn’t take a long time to develop.  Some of the songs here could have been stretched into seven minute monster jams, but Foma manages to move through a ton of ideas in the context of three minute songs, which is a pretty cool trick.  While the album is solid top-to-bottom, a couple of tracks stand out as particularly stellar.  The closing song, “Ess-Ther’s Victory” is a quieter, ukulele driven track with a softer feel than much of the record and pillowy, dreamy strings floating in the background.  “Papillon” starts of with some background chatter (which I love, in that it emphasizes that this is, you know, a record) before launching into a slowly building, cascading anthem.  It’s a winner.  “Hannah, it’s Finished” is also top-notch, mostly for that surprising bit mentioned above, but also for the synergy between Schmidt and Hawthorne’s voices.  She’s got a high, pretty lilt that works perfectly behind Hawthorne’s slighlty smokier delivery.  The lyrics are great in that one too: “How calmly does the olive branch observe the sky begin to blanch without a cry, without a prayer, leaving only a trail of despair, ahhhh.”  I have no idea what that means, but the words sound good together and it’s arty as hell.

One last positive piece of information on the Foma front: the album is self-released.  The DIY punk snob in me always digs that.  Foma doesn’t need the man to tell them what their album should sound like, nor do they need any bloated and corrupt assistance getting the album to the masses.  Inverness is both a solid half hour of music and a way to thumb your nose as corporate greed.  Essentially, buying a copy of Foma’s new record will please your ears and provide a bit of counterbalance to your overtly consumerist lifestyle. (Assuming, of course, that you’ve got an iphone and stop at Starbuck’s every morning.  If you’ve got a windmill on your house and sew your own clothes, my bad.)

“Seraphim Succubi” – Foma