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Mercy's Web:
Callasa
As an experiment, the first time I listened to Tennessee band Mercys Webs new album Callasa, I listened to it in the company of a good friend of mine, who, suffice it to say, is not a fan of good music. Anyway, I pop in the CD, and play the first track, and as were sitting there, assessing the sound, I hear my friend exclaim, this is a really good CD! So then a little voice in the back of my head says, Hmm, thats odd. Were only five seconds into the song. The lyrics havent even started yet. You really cant figure out whether a band is good or not from the first five seconds, now can you? No, but it does tell you a little something about the band, doesnt it? It tells you that the band is very adept at creating a sound in the first five seconds that would appeal to the majority of crap music loving audiences. I present to you this conversation with myself as a way of explaining to you the problem I have with this album. Let me continue. The sound is reminiscent of an Athenaeum, or Bowling for Soup, although without the nearing-profundity of the former or the laugh-out-loud humor of the latter. Mercys Web is a saddeningly normal band. Once again, I say this to try to get at the reason I dislike the album. Let me try and spell it out for you as best I can: Callasa is the product of a band with all the ingredients for a popular band, but without anything that makes it stand out. No humor, no atypical chord progressions, no lyrics about anything more than teenage love. Each song is based on a semi-interesting phrase or word, such as Mindbomb or Lady of the Mountain, in which the choruses like to repeat over and over, but still lack anything more profound than what a first listen would reveal. And believe me, I tried. All in all, Mercys Web does nothing wrong, but perhaps that is part of what they did wrong. They didnt make any jumps into the abstract, no dissonance except that which has been done over and over. They seem so afraid to make any step that might alienate part of their potential audience, but in doing so, they have managed to alienate me.
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