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East River Pipe, "Garbageheads on Endless Stun"
The essence of 'doing it yourself' is to avoid any hints of compromise, watering down, or loss of vision so that you may release a work that is totally and completely pure. It's a personal expression that is something to be proud of. Unfortunately, it seems that along the road to self-actualization some people eschew both quality control and thoughtful planning.
East River Pipe consists entirely of F.M. Cornog and his Tascam 388 mini-studio, so it is safe to say that Garbageheads on Endless Stun, his most recent album is entirely his. I'm somewhat confounded by this release, however. It appears as though this singer/songwriter has very little to say over the course of forty four minutes, mindlessly linking phrases and songs together with no sense of concept or cohesion. Mind you, it's not done in a clever way, it's done in a way that resembles a late night songbreaking session where the singer is just making words up to fill in space before they write the real lyrics. "Arrival Pad #19" drops a fuzzy clap beat along with a stuttering bass line that sets the track off on the right foot. Cornog further deepens the song with synthesized string arrangements that carry his singing through the first verse. Things lose their way at the song's midpoint however, as he begins to speak his lyrics in the style of an airport terminal public announcement, and then letting the song just drift off along with any number of promising ideas that presented themselves in the piece's brief duration. The song certainly could have stood to have a few more verses, and the tossed off feel that this abandonment cements into the album rears it's head again and again. "Streetwalkin' Jean" is a banal ode to a nineteen year old prostitute that takes a weak stab at poignancy in its final verse of painfully purple prose. It appears as if Cornog is looking to pen a song meant to draw some sort of feelings out but is either unwilling or unable to delve into anything more than perfunctory word association. "No self esteem / but eyes that still gleam." We'll just take your word for it. Though the album suffers from a perpetually slow motion tempo, much of the music that backs the needless words comes across very well. There are enough pretty melodies and synth chorales to make it moderately interesting, but it would be nice to have seen them expanded, developed, explored, and not just thrown out on a whim and left to whither under the weight of Cornog's lyrical filler. For what should in theory be an individual showing off their own thoughts and musical desires, Garbageheads on Endless Stun feels like a desultory mess.
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