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Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
Boston Globe photo of Mike Fiore
I shot some promo photos of Mike last week, and today one ran in the weekend section, nice and huge, photo credit and all. Congrats to Mike on a very positive review for his new album!
FACES ON FILM | “The Troubles”
Is it possible to contract and expand at the same time? The Boston band Faces on Film has achieved just such an unlikely transformation. Formed by a few college pals in 2004, the band has been scaled back to just one member - singer and songwriter Mike Fiore - who this week released online an emotionally sprawling second album called “The Troubles.”
Toggling between warm meditations and carefully managed chaos, the album is built around an uneasy but elegantly executed juxtaposition - the collision of the intimate and the epic - and it colors the collection in a million shades of gray. Fiore’s words are beyond gray; they’re nearly inscrutable. Damaged domesticity seems to be a theme. Wives and children materialize with dark and alarming frequency.
But after countless listens, lyrics in hand, most of the meaning on “The Troubles” is still conveyed through the ebb and flow of the music. And move the music does, in mysterious and often gripping ways. The plucked guitar and simple melody that creates a homey mood on “I’ll Sleep to Protect You” are sucked into a dissonant riptide, resurfacing near the song’s finish as bruised shadows of their former selves. “Surra” evolves from mild-mannered to pummeling, mirroring a story line (such as it is) that moves from candy-flavored leaves to rape machines. Set in a thicket of jingle bells, drum fills, and droning guitars, “Friends With Both Arms” is all verse, one unresolved musical thought from beginning to end.
But Fiore, who sings in a brittle, plaintive tenor, also finds power in a subtler musical math. “Natalie’s Numbers” is a folk song haunted by what seems to be a simmering tea kettle, the very sound of “the breath that whistles in my chest.” A pair of scruffy waltzes (“Famous Last Words” and “The Medical Mind”) transcend their murky messages to become soulful slices of Americana.
On the album’s sort-of title song, “The Troubles at Last,” Fiore dispenses with words altogether, conjuring the fleeting nature of clarity in the clearest terms possible when he allows a minute of random plinking and plucking to gel, briefly, into a song.
“The Troubles” is available as a $9.99 download at myspace.com/facesonfilm. Faces on Film performs at the Middle East Upstairs on July 9.
-JOAN ANDERMAN
