An analysis of Lostocean’s Douse the Choir - By N.L. Belardes

“The clouds sketch black-and-white photographs…”

Do they? Maybe in my mind the plump gloved hands of Cumulus clouds use a 99-color Crayola box to create a waxy cartoony world of cottony dreams…

Aside from a need to proofread their writings a little better I found myself impressed by the Christian-influenced lyrics found within Lostocean’s debut CD, Douse the Choir.

The first track, “Mute” builds on thoughts that imagining segments of one’s own life in the clouds could be good or bad. It’s a great piece of music that dances through an entrancing key change into the album’s second song, “Douse the Choir”. This jazzy Dreampop band, thoroughly a new Bakersfield experiment in sound is captured in the second track, a song of death and longing in a teary contemplation of afterlife and pity for the unsaved, “where the dead cry for their lost below.” Drummer Christopher Short has a completely narrative innocence to his lyricism and should be read simply for his run-together imagery-filled poetics.

Such idealism, though subtle is as poignant as ever in track three. “Solace” is a fast-moving song that continues such themes into a hard drinking bout of unreality in a tormented world that doesn’t listen. “I choke on the witness,” comes the cries of Jeff Gray who begs, “open your heart and receive the cure…” clearly a ballad to the unsaved.

The piano intro of “Stillife” is a mesmerizing movie moment, a score captured for a dramatic cinematic moment in thought: there’s the soft rain, the car headlights, the apathetic man staring, in love. Is it Christian love for someone who knows he can’t exist without feeling heavenly love? is it the lost pain of entranced physical love? That’s clearly left up to the listener to decide as you can play this song like a movie in your own head… The point? This kind of song if analyzed, self-reflected and debated leaves you wondering if others truly feel such a void without God, karma, alcohol, lovers, friendship, church, candy bars, sex, peanut butter, drugs, my blog, you get the idea…

Innocence is lost in the song “Accident” which declares the metaphorical truth of the American Dream is like a car wrecked in a field. The song takes you on a quick journey with some fancy pants guy in an Armani suit realizing he can’t fit his Beamer into a coffin. That’s the short version, but in essence I agree, though in such a capitalistic society, moralistic truths seem to be embedded in the pursuit of a Wealth of Nations… like Las Vegas as the sin-heart, the mad city of lights and the materialistic realization of the American Dream… but then I am going off on a tangent.

“Rest in Grace” is a beautiful lullaby to the memory of lost life. Give it a listen and if the piano doesn’t wrench you, the subtle flow of background sounds that wail in a dark moment of loss from Skyler’s keyboard tears will drain you… Once again, here is a song that plays like the opening of a movie. You can see through the eye of a camera that pans across a small town, just above a tree line and toward the sun…

The jazzy nature of “Your voice, the color of stained glass” is reminiscent of the CDs highly intensive songs that juxtapose with the soothing voice of Jeff Gray. It’s marked further by Skyler’s keyboard rolls that are sure to be a part of his trademark rock energy.

Almost like a dose of Vangelis “I am therefore I think” is the band’s last appeal to the souls of listeners to reach out and do away with worldly confusion…The song slowly begins, turns jazzy, then with distortion breaks into a running instrumental lead-in with tempo changes to a final lyric-filled longing to help the transgressions of humanity with a dose of anti-philosophic emotive wisdom. With a line like “conviction needs no proof” amid the comfort of solitude, the song transforms such ideas into the permanence and potential solitude of a possible rosy pictured stained-glass afterlife. Reminds me of old Thomas Merton in the wilderness, or a lonely guru-shaman on a mountaintop, or Jack Kerouac in the mountains, longing for heavenly boddhisaatva bliss. It’s moaning and catchy ending is so high-powered that you can’t help but be pulled into its driving heart. This is truly the finality in the album with its massive and inspiring rock crescendo even though followed by an incredible movement in track eleven.

By far the most entrancing song on the CD, “Sortir la musique: a movement in Eb minor” is a swirling rock opera waltz, minus the lyrics, and an emotional piece of artwork, as angelic in its disposition as a final CD song as in its own melancholy imperfect beginning. Listen and you will understand. Although this should have been the next to the last song on this CD, what is good about such track positioning is its very nature as a blissful piece of musical genius. The melodic piano rolling across the rhythm and tempo fluctuates in and out of a temperamental mood clearly within Skyler’s head, who is not forceful at all, but patient in building his crescendo into rock operatic moments. That meshes with Jeff Gray’s guitar and a pounding drumbeat that drives along with the constant bass. The importance of such a song? Perhaps the rest of the album is incomplete without such an operatic instrumental ending. An expression of a musical movement, just one part of a rock album that in lyrics contains the rest of the message in a CD by young men who may not see eye-to-eye with their own idealism in just a few years. The young artistic eye has but one glimmer of innocence, and clearly Lost Ocean has captured such in an album worthy of spinning, not for its message as much as its innocence, bravery and romanticism in musical life-telling.

This entry was posted by N.L. Belardes, on Friday, May 27, 2005. You can leave your response.