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Owen: The
Reverend & the Beagle
Owen is the lo-fi collaboration of Reverend Kenneth Martin and Zachary Carroll. The two of them have slipped in and out of solo and collaborative work, always returning to Owen. Their newest release, The Reverend & the Beagle, gathers songs from all these permutations in a double-length album. Its a stuttering but sincere effort, overlong, but touched in places with a winning sound. Twenty-four songs is a large amount to take in for all but the most dedicated fans. This reviewer kept making it about halfway through the album before the sheer glut of material became overwhelming. Since the album is composed of side project efforts, there is a real grab bag to the sound, as well, which makes it hard to gain an impression or solid feel. There are a variety of influences ranging through the mix here: simple folk-pop, a little bit of jazz, French pop, and space rock are the notable voices. The variance in style becomes its own consistency to a certain extent, and the lo-fi approach is ever-present. The best songs here were the few instrumentals (theres no track listing, and Im not sure of the song titles) and the few little French pop-inflected numbers. The instrumental pieces are meandering journeys with no destination; indeed, they sound very much like shimmery Wes Anderson scores very pretty. Track sixteen has a gorgeous reserved bass line, so free-flowing it could be a sound check, and track 20 has a tough little Cure-ish bass that, again, goes nowhere, but sounds great. Track seventeen was this reviewers favorite a delicate, electronic saxophone piece that would be good to hear on a dark city night. Unfortunately, the rest of the album is almost a complete miss for a variety of reasons. On occasion, Owen uses electronic manipulation on the vocals, and since their voices are hardly superior anyway, the stretching and spaced-out sound on tracks like seven and eighteen make the lyrics unintelligible. On other tracks, like twelve and ten, the lyrics themselves are simply awful. Track ten is a birthday song to a girlfriend, Caroline, but the tone-deaf crooning and silly lyrics are so unpleasant that Caroline might have been forced to abandon her boyfriend. Track eleven again displays Owens complete lack of ability to sing or even construct lyrics to be sung and the simple little guitar hook is not enough to carry the song to a decent finish. The vocals on track 22 render it almost frightening. Owen obviously has roamed the wide lands of lo-fi folk and picked up a lot of influences; The Reverend & the Beagle is a testament to their ongoing experimentation. Some of these off and on collaborations obviously work better than others; some are so terrible they should have been left on the shelf and certainly not released under the Owen name. At 24 songs of mostly filler, The Reverend & The Beagle is too scattered, immature, and unfocused a release to commend.
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