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Vedette
The duo of Manuel Stagars and Neil Carlill make strange but for the most part not very compelling music. This album has its genuinely great moments but there is a lot of dross to sift through first. Vedette may have the potential to make a truly brilliant album but they fall short on so many of the songs that it leads to a frustrating listening experience.
Stilll
It is hard not to think of cLOUDDEAD when listening to Vedette; the strangely spoken lyrics in particular make the connection substantial. Much like the former, Vedette's songs work brilliantly some of the time but leave me cold nearly as frequently. Even within a song I can go from hating it to loving it and back to hating it again. Generally most of the pieces on this album start formless and wander aimlessly for a while before all of a sudden coming together to floor me. Why Stagars and Carlill mess about so much flummoxes me; they have obviously got skills worth paying attention to but hide them throughout the album.
My main beef with this album is that there is so much filler. Songs like "They're Only Gardening" and "Targets in You" are tough to get through more than once. I must admit that the music of "They're Only Gardening" is quite nice but the vocals are dreadful and they are so far forward in the mix that it is impossible to ignore them. On the other hand, tracks like "Chessmaniaque" and "Martian Corn Circle" are excellent. Throughout the entire album, Stagars and Carlill combine elements of many genres and influences but it is only on tracks like these that their work gels together into something listenable.
Maybe I am just a miserable git but the more upbeat sections of the album tend to be the ones I skip. The slower and more depressed sounding the songs get, the better they sound. By far the best song is the dreariest, "On Canvas," which mixes beautiful slow melodies with recordings of the sea and tasteful use of effects on the vocals, gorgeous stuff. Unfortunately, it just cuts off abruptly which means the song ends on a bad taste.
Overall, while Vedette may have had high hopes for this album but it never stays together long enough to make it truly worthwhile listening to more than a couple of times. There are a few tracks that I will add to my MP3 library but as an album it will be shelved. I would not dismiss future releases by them without hearing them but this is a disappointing album on the whole.
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