What works for some people, doesn’t always work for others, and whilst the shape-shifting, side-winding, theatrical burlesque perfected by Stephin Merrit’s ’69 Love Songs’ works for Stephen Merrit, the same display of outrageous versatility in the hands of ‘proper’ bands like ‘Gram Rabbit’ seems awkward by comparison. You see, Stephin Merrit is one man. The Magnetic Fields too are ostensibly just one man. One man can lunge, lurch and leap and the whole thing still seems coordinated, but when a group of four disproportionate individuals, with varying degrees of flexibility attempt the same thing, it looks ungainly. Remember the Torrence Community Dance Group in Fatboy Slim’s ‘Praise You’ video? Well much the same thing is going on here; when a group of vastly different people get together and dance, you expect some degree of synchronisation. It’s only natural.
The follow-up to Gram Rabbit’s debut album, ‘Music To Start a Cult To’, sees the genre-bending Royal Order of Rabbits spreading the gospel of their self-styled ‘happy cult’ with some fairly weighty social realities; isolation, the American class-system, media spectacle, misinformation, celebrity trivia, governmental corruption and violence. For Gram Rabbit, the struggle to divine some kind of spiritual truth in this environment is rather like the struggle of a plant to survive in the desert. The opportunity to strike water might seldom arise, but when it does it is seized with a passion. So far so cool.
Offbeat, wacky, whimsical, eccentric – sure you could throw all these at ‘Cultivation’ but there’s something a little too wilful about it. The album cover alone testifies to this: a man in a bunny outfit, standing in the desert, head-bowed, and in the background the silhouette of a Joshua Tree. Let’s face it you couldn’t be anymore eccentric than if you moonwalked into a practical joke shop with a pile of Captain Beefheart records under your arm, a parrot on your shoulder and asked the assistant for a Nabakov Takeaway in pure Klingon. Sure there’s a lot going on here: downtempo psychedelia (‘Waiting In The Kountry’), quirky electronica (‘Bloody Bunnies’), Gram Parsons (‘Angel Song’), 69 Love Songs (‘Charlies Kids’) jarring baroque (‘Paper Heart’) and grungey space rock (‘Slopoke’) – but in all fairness, there’s perhaps too much going on. Tracks like ‘Follow Your Heart’, ‘Hares Don’t Have Tea’ and ‘Jesus & I’ may sparkle and shine with an almighty clever lustre but the sheer volume of information generally makes for a rather cumbersome crock of gold.
Jesika von Rabbit may have a future. Todd Rutherhood may have a future but whether or not they bring Travis and Eric along with the next ride is anyone’s guess.
Excellent in parts, but lacking the will to line dance.