National Eye
(Park the Van)
At certain moments and in just the right light, Philadelphia's National Eye hinted at something transcendent with their first two releases, but left listeners nearly as frustrated as they were sometimes blown away. But while their latest, The Farthest Shore, still doesn't quite make that memorable grade, the band has certainly closed the gap. That's a bit surprising in itself given the record's fitful history: Originally conceived as a musical movie about a young man on a quest to find someone he inadvertently turned invisible, the songs were written to mirror the adventures that follow ("featuring a type of animation that hasn't been invented yet," reads the one-sheet). When it became clear the visual element wasn't going to happen, the 12 songs recorded - which were never intended as a concept record, per se -- were released and left to stand on their own. (Note that this is a digital-only release and not available on CD or vinyl.)
And that they do, sometimes quite spectacularly, as the band creates an accommodatingly spacey aesthetic that seamlessly envelops loping orchestrated pop ("Slow Boat to Trinidad," which echoes Donavon's "Atlantis"), strings-and-guitars twang (the Neil Young-like "Installed in the Dark"), Granddaddy-esque psychotropic excursions ("The Effortless Plane"), and even lounge-y jazz rock burnished with odd-but-not-overbearing synth noise ("Through Fields of Fixed Stars").
Despite eschewing simple hooks and easy-bake verse-verse-chorus recipes, National Eye's inclinations veer pop-ward as often as they do toward the adventurous -- if there's an Achilles heel it's that those opposable ideas still make a song or two sound unsure which direction its headed in, and you wonder what might happen if they toned down one element in favor of the other and, say, made a more obvious pop record. Penultimate track "Pure Film," with its pulsing rhythms and slo-burn build to crescendo, hints that they'd probably be quite good at one.
Still, with a narrative bent that, even in the most straight-forward song, includes the line "I think I'm gonna cut off my ear/I've been thinking that for several years," maybe it's best National Eye stick to its own formula, especially since the dividends are growing. In the end, the original songs-to-a-film conceit seems to have helped focus the band toward a sound more their own after their first two full-lengths -- while full of promise -- suggested a band still at battle with several stylistic version of itself. They may yet attain greatness, too, because The Farthest Shore doesn't seem that far away.
Standout Tracks: "Slow Boat to Trinidad," "Pure Film" JOHN SCHACHT
