Rating:

(Kemado, 2006) The Fever know that, first and foremost, a good album must be interesting. Getting trapped in a genre is many bands’ worst nightmare, and their debut, 2004’s Red Bedroom, had them pegged as a dance-punk band just as the dance-punk revival was jumping the shark. There are any number of things a band can do to try to liven things up and break free of a stereotype, and The Fever did several. First, they lost guitarist Chris Sanchez and decided not to replace him but simply move bassist Keith Stapleton to guitar. Then they holed themselves up in a basement, writing the second album with the intent of sonic exploration. Drummer Achilles Tzoulafis expanded his drumkit to include mechanic shop scraps and keyboardist J. Ruggiero grabbed just about every instrument with a similar layout (xylophone, pump organ, accordian, etc.) and one with nothing in common (theremin). What results sounds more like music for a Tim Burton movie than a dance hall. Sure, the drums and keys on “Bye Bye Baby Blue” and “Hotel Fantom” skitter in traditional dance-punk fashion, but elsewhere toy pianos and warbling organs call up images of an abandoned carnival ground. Another notable new pair of influnce appears to be Rockabilly and Swing, particularly “Mr. Baby”’s driving horn section and the guitar work on “The Secret” and “Curtains” (and the first half of “Yr Fool” could fit on just about any Brian Setzer album). So did The Fever succeed in making In The City Of Sleep feel interesting? Most definitely. All of that would be for naught if the music was drab, but this close-knit quartet didn’t just throw bells and whistles on a mediocre musical mess; what they deliver is a modern marvelous melodic masterpiece. My one complaint is that, at 16 tracks, it’s hard to keep anyone intersted. As two shorter albums (or a full-length and an EP), this would be knocking ‘em dead, but our microwave attention spans take one look at the tracklist and know they’re in for multiple listenings just to get from start to finish.

 1. Curtains
 2. Redhead
 3. Waiting For The Centipede
 4. The Secret
 5. Crying Wolf
 6. Magnus
 7. Gypsy Cab/Down On Dog Street
 8. Little Lamb & The Shiny Silver Bullets
 9. Do The Tramp
10. Bye Bye Betty Blue
11. Eyes On The Road
12. Circus Girl
13. Hotel Fantom
14. Pink Smoke
15. Mr. Baby
16. Yr Fool

Buy album

– Quinton

This 45-beetsreview was posted on May 25th, 2006. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.