After a couple years of emphatic, self-imposed obscurity and a perceived loyalty to the audio cassette, the Puget Sound's Stradhoughton Echo have finally compromised with and demurred to technology and market norms – releasing their first CD full-length all by themselves. The North American Fox Hunter is the title, and it presents a personality entirely appropriate for the enigmatic, egocentric group. Just as a Stradhoughton Echo performance is designed to empty a room by defying audience expectations and comfort zones, this disc's song selection is organized in an erratic, haphazard fashion that allows for no comfort or 'flow'. The up and mid tempo ditties are followed abruptly by down tempo and acidic meanderings, and old songs (from their cassette EP) are mixed awkwardly with new ones.
Influenced by a menagerie of song writers and sonic experimenters (A Minor Forest, Don Caballero, Pedro, and other obscure and not-so-obscure indie legends), Benjamin Kennedy and crew craft melodies that either hook and sway or go the completely opposite direction into mood songs with almost un-quantifiable melodies that creep and linger and attack with their trademark water-metal-glass sounds, and other such nuance-ical effects (hanging mid-range distortion, etc). Always the crowning example of musical self-indulgence, the Echo have a strong and contrived tendency towards dragging songs out, especially the ones that scrape your neurons and flick the hairs in your ear. And then they will rebel against even themselves and pump out a sure-fire radio song or three, compliant in length and catchiness. And then they will get pissed off and destroy it, as in the sixth track which rapes and mutilates a beautiful Pedro-esque song before it ends – spitting and jumping on it with perverse, furious distortion.
They're showoffs, basically. They want you and everyone who thinks they can write songs to know that they can write good songs and destroy them without even thinking about it. They can build a progression, temper a tempo, mold a melody, blend a bliss, do the Chicago thing, do the Seattle thing, do the Greenwich thing, and they can do it in their sleep. And they don't care. I don't use the word 'art' very often in a modern music review, but this is one of the very few times that it seems wholly defendable. Benjamin Kennedy has a beautiful voice, he can write intelligent, meaningful lyrics, the Echo can create immaculate melodies, but that apparently has just 'been done' too much, and can't justify their existence enough to allow them a niche within it. They have to bug you. They have to scold you. They have to show you up. They have to taunt you and ridicule you and passively aggress against you. Underneath shimmering, conservative high hats, whisking beats, serene lullabies, and rock-roll mastery beyond what it was ever intended to be there is a right brain severely and utterly in love with itself and in bitter contempt with you.
The only way to strike back at a brilliantly pompous work such as this is to buy the album and enjoy it, which despite their best efforts is quite doable. By acting with such impudence you will either subdue the Echo or drive it farther into madness and rebellion.
