Inviolet Row/Consolation Prizes
CD Review in Las Vegas City Life
November 27, 2002
By Dr. Joshua Ellis
Inviolet Row's new CD, Consolation Prizes, may be the only CD released in Las Vegas - or all of America - this year whose lyrics include [+]Inviolet Row/Consolation Prizes
CD Review in Las Vegas City Life
November 27, 2002
By Dr. Joshua Ellis
Inviolet Row's new CD, Consolation Prizes, may be the only CD released in Las Vegas - or all of America - this year whose lyrics includes the word "Kurdistans."
Consolation Prizes is an album which can't seem to make up its mind. Is it ethereal folk-pop like Belle & Sebastian or lush gloomy Echo & the Bunnymen psychedelia? Is it having Phish for dinner, and are there Beatles scurrying underfoot? Or is it just more shitty navel-gazing indie rock, the kind that the thrift-chic androgyny crowd have been pushing on us for the last five years?
I'd say the answer is no, though I'm not sure to which question. Inviolet Row reminds me most, actually, of the Church - that legendary Aussie band who never really achieved the kind of success in the Northern Hemisphere that their countrymen INXS and Midnight Oil did, despite being scads better than either of those bands, which were pretty damn good in their own right. Front man Lee Scrivner's lyrics are just as lovely and often as obscure as those of Steve Kilbey, the Church's lead singer and bassist.
There are occasional moments of overproduction on the album, which is not surprising, since Lee told me that they'd been mixing and producing Consolation Prizes for months. Any band given that amount of time to play around with the music inevitably gets its Pink Floyd on: weird chorus effects, strange strings and Jim Steinman backing vocals. The track "Shoot For The
Moon," in particular, sounds like it suffers from a surfeit of free time. But it's forgivable in this case, and not as bad as it could have been. Pretentiousness is not always a bad thing - sometimes it's simply a case of, well, shooting for the moon. Sometimes you hit the mark, sometimes you don't ... and Inviolet Row hits it more often than not.
Too many bands these days want to be Radiohead, and most of them have neither the talent nor the wit to do so. Inviolet Row isn't Radiohead - but they could be, someday, and they're probably the closest thing we have out here in the Great Neon Golgotha.
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