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BUY THE CD
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Anyone who’s been to a job interview knows the importance of selling yourself. It’s a task much easier said than done,
requiring a certain amount of on the spot interpretation and conversation as you try to adapt to the personality of your
interviewer. Along with this may come some embellishment—maybe your time as a road paver becomes your time as a
Transportation Efficiency Coordinator. This predicament will resolve itself in one of two ways: the interviewer will either realize what’s
going on and not call you back or be fooled and hire you, throwing you into a world of
unreachable expectations, eventually resulting in your timely, and likely humiliating,
firing. Other than the firing (although I am going to stop listening), the latter is exactly how I feel about my first
experience with Edmontonian musician Calvin Love and his sophomore effort, Super Future.
According to his website bio, Calvin Love is “...as menacing as he is magnetic, like sex and murder wrapped together in
a trench coat. The music drips with crystal aura...Calvin does it all with convincing ease, a crooked handsomeness belying
his wide-eyed honesty and the curious experimentation of these tunes...with Super Future Calvin Love casts a black light
shadow on the white of sun-soaked skies.”
Call me old-fashioned, but if you tell me that you’re like sex and murder wrapped in a trench coat, you’d better be changing
my life with your music. Not only does it not do that—which to some extent is forgivable—but it’s far removed from
anything remotely original. The album as a whole reminds me of something you would hear over the speakers in a failing reggae lounge
that can no longer afford to pay a live band.
With the exception of “Daydream” and “You and I,” each song is set to a generic keyboard beat reminiscent of something
Gene from Bob’s Burgers would compose—although I think even Gene would probably change it up a little more. Everything
else, including the other components of the aforementioned songs, is a mishmash of Love’s nasal
twisting of notes,
simple keyboard and guitar melodies made even more embarrassing by Love’s painfully out of place and all too frequent
ooohs, ahhhs, and ooows, and pathetic attempts at inventiveness—if you can call random insertions of tambourines,
maracas, and pianos inventive.
The lesson: be careful what you say. And yes, I’m aware of the irony, since I’m ripping this album to shreds. But I
also have never claimed to write my reviews with convincing ease and wide-eyed honesty. As for the album, if you’re still considering buying it, I’m sure it’s going to be dripping its crystal aura all over the bargain bin soon
enough.
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