I’ve been trying to write about the Odessa compilation Odessaic Arrtctosk Plation for a couple of days now and I have been getting nowhere.Maybe because I have been coming to it so late in the afternnon I am about written out for the day or maybe because what connects the thirteen -ten brand new , songs, are the artists who seem to free float from one band to another and one sound to another with a beguiling ease and Paul Finn -the guy who spearheads the lot as well as playing keyboards for the Kingsbury Manx, rather than a defining sound.
Though there may be two or three defining sounds.
Folk rock harder:Spider bags, Americans In France, Waumiss, Shit Horse, Inspector 22, Fan Modine, Wild Wild Geese
Folk rock softer: the Kingsbury Manx, Impossible Arms, Hot Summer Night, Wesley Wolfe, Transportation, Mowing Lawns
Sure that’s a big brush and sure when I say “folk” I mean the word in the Louis Armstrong vein: music for folks. But I still think it is a fair claim that Finn has a soft/hard side to his taste in music and for every Americans In France and Shit Horse there is an Impossible Arms and sometimes the same players in each.
I would pay twenty bucks for this album if only to get my hands on the Patrick Stickles best album of the 00s, Spider Bags A Celebration Of Hunger outtake, “He Died For You”. A sick as in brilliant and just as sick as the rest of the bizarre and brilliant album it was left off with the mantra repeated somewhere between antagonistic and devastated. It sounds theological and aggravated but maybe it isn’t.
Let’s be honest, at a little pass the half way mark, a Spider Bags song should essentially make everything around it seem a little redundant. But Mowing Lane’s “Long Destruction” is such a weirdly pretty middle ground you are kinda relieved to hear something so pretty.
More than once Finn pulls off this sleight of hand. The album starts with the always melodically gifted Wesley Wolfe and follows it with Americans In France’s Exene on sedatives redux (that would be Casey Cook, she also painted the cover -see above!) “The Mingler”.
Song in, song out, Finn has found some pretty awesome material. When you think of a compiliation you think of, I dunner, a quick fix, a cut and paste. This isn’t. This is an introduction to a record company’s artists and fits together as a sliding, slithering, in and out, strange and friendly rock music moment.
A real good album and only six bucks… go to odessarecords.com