If nothing else, I’ve learned two things as an English major. First, always follow the “show don’t tell” model — rather than writing abstract, existential prose about a suburban kid, rebelling against his white-collar parents, sit said private schooler down in his room listening to Clipse and UGK on his oversized headphones, with dreams of DJing and spitting 16 bars over the latest Timbaland beat. I’ve also learned that a lot of indie rockers were, at one time, English majors. The genre seems to be making an overarching, whole-hearted effort to trend toward writing personalized, affecting lyrics à la John Darnielle (of The Mountain Goats fame).
Fishboy is no different. The group’s latest release, Albatross: How We Failed to Save the Lone Star State with The Power of Rock and Roll, is riddled with stories of fishermen lost at sea, grade school spelling bees, and criminal trials. A concept album about, “how [frontman, Eric Michener], the band, and the ghost of Buddy Holly attempt to save Texas by going on a tour/crime spree in order to perform all 8,030 of the songs [he’s] written in [his] sleep since [he] was in the womb,” Albatross is ripe with stories for just such lyricism.
Outlandish concepts aside though, Albatross plays like a perfectly succinct and collected work. Few tracks run over three minutes, while all of them seem to coalesce together, creating more of a composed piece, broken into varying acts, rather than an album of wholly separated tracks. When “Blackout/Flashback” gels seamlessly into the distorted intro of “Half Time at the Proper Name Spelling Bee” — a track that sounds incredibly reminiscent of Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, as Michener’s voice embodies the same searing, nasally quality Jeff Magnum became known for — the concept aspect of the album seems fully realized.
And yet the most disappointing aspect of this disc is that those showing-not-telling lyrics seem to fall flat in the exact moments when they’re supposed to be most powerful. When Michener sings, “I’m so broke it makes me sick/ I use cut-up credit cards for guitar picks” on “Taqueria Girl,” his jovial croons make it impossible to believe he’s truly upset about where his life is. Similar blunders appear on the aforementioned “Half Time at the Proper Name Spelling Bee” (“At the proper name spelling bee everyone loses”) and “Thought Balloon” (“When the trial/ Started Monday I decided/ To represent myself/ They called it on TV / The trial of the century”).
Though maybe it’s the album’s concept that pigeonholes these lines into abstraction and banality. Michener obviously has the chops to write alongside the likes of Darnielle and others, yet something about Albatross seems slightly off-kilter. As Mountain Goats’ tracks seem true to life, Fishboy’s distended concept occasionally forces the lyrics/album into the realm of the surreal, a place they are wholly unprepared to arrive. In any case, it’s clear that Fishboy fits squarely into the indie rock cannon. They just need to stop trying to save the Lone Star state and focus a bit more in the studio or in their rooms listening to UGK or wherever they happen to write.
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