Many terrible ideas were once passable concepts on paper. Some misguided case will wonder to himself “what if?” and unknowingly unleash a factory of bile-inducing creations onto the world. What if in a hilarious new reality show viewers at home telephone in and have their collective voices projected live to mentally unstable prisoners in isolation for three side-splitting weeks? What if we pitch a musical in which the cast are informed of the death of their beloved household pet mere minutes before stepping on stage? What if we, Donny Hue and the colors, combine indie-folk tendencies with the surrealism of psychedelia?
What if we stop for a moment and try to define psychfolk? Really, how are we qualifying this? Because if Folkmote successfully depicts the genre, then I can only assume the going criterion is Creative Writing 101 prose based on a mosaic of drug-hazed refrigerator magnet combinations. Join Donny as he wears out his rhyming dictionary/thesaurus and travels “hand in hand” with “piano dreams,” meeting “dissonant capriccios” which brag “of their families” and then later “wait for a year by a tiny marble stone” but not before creating “makeshift parallelograms”. At least I think that’s what’s happening.
Folkmote is laden with ideas that just don’t quite work. This is essentially an act of trying to steer a ship made from towels, as Donny Hue fulfills his “what if” of making musical surrealism serviceably flat. One of the unfortunate truths about being in a band whose overriding characteristics are based around propelling sonic oddities and an off-kilter atmosphere is that it has to actually be an overriding characteristic. Instead, Folkmote follows the route of using the concept of a surrealist gypsy jamboree as an aimless extension of their Apples in Stereo indie-reproduction.
Among the checklist of things that are diluted in to near-complete irrelevance are the 23+ band members and the massive quantity of instruments, which range from autoharps and theremins to organs and horns. But Folkmote’s instrumentation quickly becomes a process of piling instrument upon instrument with no perceivable pattern of arrangement. Instead, it transforms into a musical porridge where glockenspiels wade deep in the watered-down psychedelia, while fist-pounded organs try to divide through the thick, cloying syrup of Hue’s vocals.
“Humming with the Flowerbirds” and possibly “Real Long Time” exist immediately outside of the platitudes of the rest of the album and successfully make use of the 1960s misfit-sensibility that Folkmote never seems to fully own up to. If the album in its entirety is successful in any way, it’s as a reminder that acting less as a lush, psychedelic jam and more as a predictable and repetitive cycle of indie folk song archetypes featuring an infinite number of instruments wedged unreachably in the crotch of every song is [not] how to make psychfolk.