Piebald’s seventh collection is out and for best acoustics one needs only to listen in your car where the sound is meted out and makes surprising clamor in the lost and found portals around the doors.
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Piebald
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Art
" Accidental Gentlemen
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(Side One Dummy)
Released January 23, 2007
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“Opener” is the first track and melodically sounds like the escaped mental ex-husband banging steadily on the back door with taunting remarks. “If you don’t wanna know, why’d you a-ask,” and “If you’re the one who feels that I’m the one who let you go,” are lines delivered with a mature solemnity to busting up the listener’s speed of perception. It’s an I-get-it, I-get-it overload once you have a second to smile and take in how cool is all this violent, playful noise.
“Runnin’ down the road tryin’ to roosen my road is what Mike heard when he was in Japan. Cuz there’s no ‘L’ in the language,” so with that in mind, Travis Shettel sings in the style of the Eagles song “Take It Easy” on “A Friend of Mine”. Everything about this album is satirical and calls out hypocrisy. Though it never claims to know everything, one can sum it all up with the lyrics from track ten’s “Life on the Farm:: “Just wanna live on the earth. So I ain’t a judge a man’s worth.”
Accidental Gentlemen was produced the old analogue way, guys! So, it knows enough. Makes you appreciate Alex Newport who mixed At the Drive-In’s music for his versatility between so much gnashing guitar and the rapid-fire vocals of Cedric Bixler Zavala, to the ever octave-challenging pipes of Travis Shettel, in conjunction with Aaron Stuart’s complementarily garbled guitar. Still you have to imagine what your favorite artists would sound like without a computer. Tragically, it would be bye bye to Fat Boy Slim and the ever eclectic Bjork. But from live shows and unplugged tracks one would think Radiohead could complete Hell Day in combat training. Some people sound weird with too much production, I mean just look at Tenacious D and Owen. Whatever is your jam, Piebald had the right idea on this one. So back to the spin!
There’s peculiarly hidden pop in here. Such as a few guitar riffs from “I Wanna Be Your Dog” by The Stooges on “Shark Attack” and fun cheers of “M’yow,m’yow,m’yow,m’yow,m’yow,m’yow! Shake it! Shake it!” on “Getting Mugged and Loving It”. Just as you settle a decision on what you’ve detected, there’s more rad stuff on here. There’s a little backing vocal to Track Three’s “Don’t Tell Me Nothing” which is reminiscent of “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” by The Beach Boys.
Sudden fluctuations in each song set the refrains up nicely such as “If it’s kind of a joke, then there also is some truth,” in “There’s Always Something to Do”. Piano added to the reverb of guitar is a happy marriage in the analog home built for them as well. “Oh the Congestion” seems a throwback of “Salvation” by The Cranberries, but no proof that’s intentional. Yet there’s enough breakdown to take you from mid-nineties nostalgia to what you could swear to be a lost sitcom theme song from the early eighties. If you listen to the messages which are practically signposted by the sweeping alterations in tempo and key, you’ll notice a few of the songs are late. Titles are sung as verses in other songs, giving the argumentative artistic reminder this is an entire record. Listen to the whole thing. When you do, you won’t feel like anything’s out of place. If these were the only Piebald examples you had and your friend wanted to hear them, this is all that would make sense in the task of arrangement.
Finally, “Roll On” is an ingenious piece done with Vaudevillian piano and children joining in the sentiment, “Let’s go ride our bikes,” is inspiring after Shettel endured the attack. It gives the feeling of lulls in Queen ballads. “Roll On” ends with the turning of a bike wheel that runs until it stops. The album picks up from there into a secret ornery track asking, “What do you do when all your friends around you suck?” The guitars become very Detroit with speed-metal reminiscent drums. After that the whole thing abruptly goes to bed. There are not many times when we can sincerely know and thank a band for an album.
Thank you, Piebald, Side One Dummy, the engineers, distributors, mail carriers, and stores for what is next year’s model.
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