Note: Max here. Not sure how I let this get so long. Please read it anyway. It’ll crack you up. I think it’ll be more enjoyable if you are listening while you read it, so try to make that happen.
I never got around to making a top albums of 2008 list. I think it has quite a large sum to do with personal laziness, but I’m going to take the time to write a couple short reviews for some albums from last year that I think deserve mentioning.
Let’s start with Razia’s Shadow: A Musical, by Forgive Durden, which is easily the dorkiest record I heard last year, and unabashedly so. It’s an album inspired by immense theatre geekery, but also a good heap of fantasy. Razia’s Shadow is a concept album to the extreme. It’s essentially the soundtrack to a musical too elaborate and dorky for anyone to ever put on, and it’s awesome. It’s by a band called Forgive Durden, whose previous work I’m completely unfamiliar with. I heard of the project because of the many guest vocalists on the album, a myriad of emo/pop-punk stars, all of whom play a certain character in the story. Aaron Weiss of mewithoutYou (whose upcoming album is eagerly anticipated by this critic) narrates with a brilliant, croaky charisma.
The plot is difficult to decipher without a little effort– Thomas Dutton, who wrote the thing and plays the main character in both halves of the story, spared us the exposition– but wikipedians came to my rescue, and a quick read of that page made the listening experience much better, once I figured out what was going on. Most of this review is plot summary, because I think it’s kind of needed in order to parse this album and appreciate its awesomeness or its silliness.
Like I mentioned, there are two halves of the story. In the first, a God-like character named O The Scientist (Casey Crescenzo of The Dear Hunter), creates the world. An angel named Ahrima (Thomas Dutton) feels like he’s not given enough credit for his skillz (which are never really made clear) and gets pissed off. Then, a spider called Barayas (Max Bemis of Say Anything, altogether cool raspy-voiced guy who pulled a similar emo-guest-party on his album In Defense of the Genre) lands on his shoulder, and I guess he’s some kind of would-be terrorist, because he convinces Ahrima to “bring those lamps back to me, don’t leave them in one piece” to gain everyone’s respect. The thing is, destroying “those lamps” for some reason pretty much destroys the world. It doesn’t make sense to me either, but it works, and this is one of the best songs on the album.
Despite the world being burned down, everyone’s okay. They just move somewhere else. I don’t know, whatever. But Ahrima must be punished, so Toba The Tura (Chris Conley of Saves The Day) arrives to fuck him up. Conley rocks the song, starting out as a sort of understanding, sweet-voiced guy, and building to a frenzied condemnation. Everyone moves to a new, “light” world, separated from his “dark” one by a mountainous wall of stone.
And then the plot skips ahead a century. Now the world is split in two, and this is symptomatic of the lack of love in the world or something. It’s silly. It’s fun. Let’s go with it.
The two songs that mark the jump are The Oracle, in which it’s prophecized that someday there will be two people whose “true love will be strong enough to erase the wrong we’ve done, the dark and light will become one” and “A Hundred-Year, Minute-Long Intermission” whose title I kind of adore. Both feature Danny Stevens of The Audition, who I’ve never heard but have me sold on the strength of their singer.
When the plot picks up, both the light and dark sides of the world have developed their own societies of people. The new main character is Adakias, again played by Thomas Dutton, who grew up on the dark side, which is later described as “forever shaded, where the jaded are never wrong.” He wants to be the one to fulfill the prophecy and restore the world via his ability to love. Other people who live on the dark side laugh at him, because obviously they’re dicks, they live on the dark side. When his brother Pallis (Brendon Urie of Panic At The Disco, who I submit to be underrated) learns of his plan to leave and search for love, he sings, “You are so foolish. The Dark has been your home. If you elope, I’ll hunt you down, through suffering you’ll atone.” Fucking yikes.
So he leaves for the Light side to search for love, and in the next song he finds it in Princess Anhura (Greta Salpeter of The Hush Sound). This song, “It’s True Love” is so silly and schmaltzy. She sings, presumably not long after meeting him, “I never would guess your touch could fill me with such thoughts to marry you, have your babies, too.” I love it. The duet builds to a powerful and, somehow, believable height. Salpeter here deserves loads of commendation for being committed to singing these lines with the conviction she does, especially when she needs to sing the name “Adakias” with affection.
The couple meet with Anhura’s father, the king (Nic Newsham of Gatsby’s American Dream, who I saw open for Bear Vs. Shark years ago), who is suspicious of Adakias and seems to suspect that he’s from the dark side (oh yeah, he’s hiding that fact). The king opens with one of my favorite lines, the absurd, “So you’re the boy I’ve heard so much about from my daughter’s open mouth.” He doesn’t approve. Adakias probably doesn’t help things when he sings, “I just want your daughter’s heart, you fool.” Dutton and Salpeter’s voices are really wonderful together here again, when his simple plea of “I love your daughter and she, well, she loves me back” builds to “All we have is love, my King, so let’s sing ‘la-da-da-da!’ You probably have to hear it to believe it, but it’s a magical moment.
Without his approval, they decide to elope in secret. However, Anhura begins to fall sick. Adakias knows this is because he’s from the dark side. Uh oh. His love is gonna get her dead! We learn this from the narrator, and the next song is poorly sequenced, as it takes a detour from the revelation we just learned, but it’s a visit to the Bawaba Brothers (John Gourley of Portugal. The Man, lending his new found Alaskan soul vocals and Kris Anaya of An Angle, AKA the most transparent rip off I’ve ever heard; he sounds just like Conor Oberst). I’m not really sure who the Bawaba Brothers are, but they tell Adakias that he’s a descendent of the guy that separated the world, and that story is more than mythical lore, which gives him confidence that he’s destined to fulfill the prophecy and restore the world. This song is one of my favorite musically, it’s just gorgeous, but probably should have happened a couple tracks sooner.
Back to our dying princess. They go see the doctor (Shawn Harris, The Matches, who are a kickass band), who is probably my favorite character here. Harris is just absurd here, he has so much fun. His Dr. Dumaya is absolutely insane. He starts out laughing maniacally and then starts coughing… maniacally, obviously. He informs them “Now what you got ain’t no quick fix, it ain’t no common cold. What you need’s a bona fide doctor’s miracle.”
What follows is so ridiculously dumb and ridiculous that I don’t know what to do besides laugh and love it. He tells her he’ll heal her on the condition that she stay with him forever. “I promise to take care of her, well rather, she’ll take care of me for the rest of her life in the Dark, fulfilling Doctor’s fantasies.” I can imagine that, but not what follows. Anhura resists, but Adakias makes her! He says “it’s the only way.” So she consents. Jesus.
So the doctor heals her…. and just then, Pallis bursts in! In the likely case that you forgot who that is, it’s Adakias’s brother who promised to hunt him down if he eloped.
This is the final song, and it is fairly epic. There is some kind of hilarious but well-written wordplay in this encounter. I just gotta quote it.
Adakias: Casanovas have charmed with chiffons, so chichi. Chased her with conceited coteries.
Anhura: Maharajahs have magniloquently mouthed their love for me through their menageries.
Adakias: She’s been propositioned, propounded by every pompous prince. Given panniers of peerless pears and plums, polished.
Anhura: I’ve been seduced with shimmering, sparkling stones. Squired by suitors to sizable chateaus.
Adakias: And I’m the one she chose.
These tongue twisters are belted out confidently to a jazzy bounce. Pallis, however, sees fit to reveal that Adakias has been lying about being from the Dark, and he’s the reason she’s dying. Of course it comes out like this. It’s kind of a tired plot contrivance, but we’ll let it go for now, because right after Pallis reveals this, he sings, “But I suppose it’s in vain, since her life is ending, when I thrust this blade into her heart-a-thumping.” Ahh!! And then comes the most gloriously, theatrically emo moment on the album, as Adakias sing-screams, “Brother no!!!” and, as we soon realize, dives in front of the blade.
This sacrifice demonstrates his true love, and the two parts of the world reunite in a showstopping, cheesy fucking display as we’re reminded that love and sacrifice conquer all. The narrator takes us out, and the curtains drop.
It’s hard to say what we just experienced. What’s great is that the melodramatic theatrics of the emo genre match perfectly with, well, melodramatic theatre. It’s a surprisingly perfect fit.
-Max Jacobson
I Ate My DVD Collection 