Shawn David McMillen
(Tompkins Square)
Shawn David McMillen comes off as something of a "jack of all trades" on Dead Friends. He plays acoustic guitar, electric guitar, piano, electronics, percussion, harmonica, and he sings and composes his own material. But like many ambitious artists, he stretches himself thin in too many directions. McMillen's main bag seems to come out of modern folk/blues guitar, and his tunes in this style are often beautiful - but just as often uneven. His moments of clarity, usually spurred by heartfelt acoustic guitar playing, are regularly undercut by serious lapses in focus.
Ironically, this seeming lack of focus is tapped to create some of the recording's better tracks. The flip side to McMillen's folk/blues tendency are his avant/psychedelic/noise leanings. "The Moth," "Night Train," and "Beladona Along The Brazos" are often intentional, claustrophobic messes of clattering percussion, manipulated electronics, and unintelligible buried murmurings. Arrhythmic barrages of sound combine with Captain Beefheart style psychedelic blues in "The Moth." Particularly dissonant is "Night Train" with it's grating, distorted, cranked up electric guitar fighting against the one, simple melodic piano line coursing through the entire tortured piece. This tune's ending comes off like an abruptly terminated existential argument.
These days "dark" seems to be in vogue and it occasionally feels like some bands try to capitalize on it as a trend. McMillen doesn't seem to be posing. The recording's title is self-explanatory in its darkness, his more tune-like pieces have a strong melancholic streak, and the CD's artwork seems like an intentional downer. The more 'avant-garde' tracks strain against self-imposed walls that can't be broken through and end up feeling like lost battles. Occasionally interesting music but often very difficult and rather average.
DOWNLOAD: "The Moth," "A Morning With Dead Friends" JOHN DWORKIN
