A Fine Frenzy
One Cell In the Sea (Virgin)
By Carlye Wisel
Published: July 28th, 2007 | 1:18pm
There’s a writing method middle-school students use. When assigned essays, they’ll flesh out their three main points and introduction, and after a slight copy-paste rearrangement of that first paragraph at the end, voila! — their conclusion is finished.
Alison Sudol, a vocalist/pianist who goes by the pseudonym A Fine Frenzy, is nowhere near ready for graduation into songwriting junior high. Employing the same processes as the aforementioned ten-year-olds on debut album One Cell In the Sea, her cookie-cutter choruses are stamped between ill-fitting verses, making for their expectedly boring, repetitive entrances.
Plagued by simplistic melodies, the 14-track snoozefest features amateur lyrics so drippy with lost love and heartache that to the listener, it feels like reading a non-poet’s post-breakup poetry put to a background of basic chord progressions.
“Almost Lover,” Cell’s apparent single, contains hauntingly beautiful verses paired with, once again, predictable, melodically dull choruses. But overall, the album is decent, even though its stand-out tracks innocently mimic other artists. “Think of You” sounds like a slowed-down Postal Service tune and “You Picked Me” channels Aqualung so much that I had to match it up with his entire discography to confirm I hadn’t heard it before.
Fortunately, Sudol has a lovely voice that acts as the album’s saving grace. But her demure, dreamy tunes hold her apparent talent back, allowing the music to become less of an outlet for putting her pipes on display, and more of a plausible soundtrack for The Secret Garden, or even a tear-filled segment of Grey’s Anatomy.
Issue #35
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