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Aidan Baker, "Songs of Flowers & Skin"
I wish there was a nicer way to say this, but Aidan Baker's newestrelease just isn't very good. It's disappointing because I trulyenjoyed a live set I caught of his in Toronto last year, and his recordwith Mnemosyne as part of last year's Piehead series was pretty solid.Here Baker is tripped up by all of the pitfalls that come from makingsad, psych-tinged guitar tunes. The vocals throughout are the kind ofmonotonous abstract poetry droning that might seem deep in a highschool-notebook kind of way, but fail to be as evocative as they shouldbe. Words like these just blur into the background and make the wholeact of singing superfluous to the music the words are riding on.Unfortunately, even the instrumental passages here don't spark withmuch imagination. Arrangements of drums, bass, and guitar get muddyquickly. While the lo-fi aesthetic can be charming, here it just feelslike some of the instruments are poorly recorded and mixed. When themix includes string tembres, the arrangement just seems too predictableand maudlin to maintain any interest. Baker has infused the tracks witha pervasive backdrop of fuzz and noise and loops that might soundinteresting on their own, but just tend to muck up the relatively cleanand straight-forward melodies. Drums are occassionally sloppy, the bassseems oversaturated, and Baker's slippery post-something guitar playingwanders off a little closer to Pink Floyd territory than Spacemen 3territory for my liking. The trouble here is that I know Baker can dosomething better and richer than this because I've heard it, so witheach successive listen I try to find the moments that I like and I keepcoming up short. By the end of "Flowerskin," a joyless dirge ofnoodling with lines like "I trample flowers into the pores of yourskin / and you slowly change colour and I love you," I'm crossing myfingers for next time.
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