Top 10 of 2006. #08. Midlake - The Trials Of Van Occupanther
Midlake. The Trials of Van Occupanther
Etch N Sketch Records (AU).

"Roscoe"
(4:49, 6.96mb)
Track 1.

"Head Home"
(5:46, 8.48mb)
Track 3.

I get the impression that Midlake have no idea what they're doing. They don't understand the music they make at all. Their first album, which has a stupid name I can't remember off the top of my head, is a bit of a mess - it's not terrible, but nothing to write home about. Sounds like the Flaming Lips or Grandaddy or something. Sure, they're jazz-trained guys who can sing and play like their lives depend on it. But Midlake have completely the wrong idea about the 1970s. I read a recent interview with them when they recently toured Australia, wherein they talk about the 1970s being a time of innocence, and how they wanted to capture that innocence on "Trials of Van Occupanther".

They're wrong. The 1970s wasn't a time of innocence. Fleetwood Mac and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young - Midlake's most obvious 1970s influences - took so much cocaine back then that it's a wonder that they still have noses. After the 1960s, every rock history and biography paints the 1970s in terms of loss of innocence, in fact - it was the time when the business guys regained control of the music. Moreover, Trials Of Van Occupanther has some cockamamie concept to it, and clumsy prog-rock poetry, which especially on the written page - "my young bride, why are your shoulders like that of an old woman?" - come off as a bit silly. There's even prominent flutes all over the album.

So, to recap, Midlake have no idea what they're doing, they're jazz guys playing rock, they have clumsy lyrics. Sounds like a recipe for disaster, but somehow their album is compulsively listenable. It just wants to be replayed. I suspect that the secret of Midlake is that in trying to emulate their heroes, but misunderstanding where the music originally came from, they have created something new. Their music does have a sound of innocence. They're not making the music so they can go on tour and get $1 million dollars each per show (see Crosby, Stills and Nash - how else were they going to pay for all that cocaine?). They're just making stuff they like. And they seem to have figured out how to write good pop songs since Peppercorn and Beefsteak or whatever their first album was called - namely, stuffing your songs with hooks and shamelessly ripping off your idols. Worked for everyone else, after all.

"Roscoe", the first track on Trials of Van Occupanther, and the best, sounds a whole bunch like Fleetwood Mac's "Rhiannon". Except, somehow, it transcends mere theivery; the jazz and prog-rock influences, the winding melody and the silly lyrics somehow bring out a new side of that kind of sound. I don't know how they do it, and I don't think they really know either, but it works. "Head Home" starts with a flute melody over Days Of Our Lives piano parts, before segueing into more moody Fleetwood Mac rhythms. It's one of those songs, however, where every bit of the song has a hook of its own (much like the best of Fleetwood Mac in the mid-70s); The flute melody is a hook, the groove of the rhythm section is a hook, the winding vocal harmonies that melisma on the word "home" after the lead singer sings "I'll think I'll head..." at the end of the verse - that's a hook and a half. And then there's the chorus, which breaks out of the tension of the verse, with more instrumental hooks and vocal melodies that are hooky. Did I mention all the hooks?