THE
TERRORDACTYLS - same
(CD,
seayou)
The Terrordactyls are not so frightening at all as
their name suggests. Quite on the opposite. Maybe the themes they are
singing about are frightening, if you look at them closely, because after
all what is more frightening than really listening to what regular people
say or to closely watch what regular people really do and then think about
it, but they cloak this kind of horror in melody and sweetness, so you want
to hug them. Just as in real life, it is easy to love humankind, but hard
not to hate people. Makes you want to shut the door and stay home as much as
possible.
The duo of Michael Cadiz and Tyrel Stendhal probably
mainly stay at home and write some beautiful, melodic songs about everyday
life and people that surround them, and if there is no real story to tell in
a song, they will break into a hymnical a capella “la la la” or “Oh oh
oh” or a double Kazoo-solo to make it all good again. That is the way with
songs about love, the inavoidability of it and the inevitable breakdown and
bitter end it has (as seen from the eyes of a mid-twen not yet settled in
life). Other than that their songs range somewhere between weird anti-folk
and the simple harmonies in child songs. No wonder that Kimya Dawson (Moldy
Peaches) pops up suddenly. Which is good, because after all Ms. Dawson seems
to be one of the main reasons that this album gets mentioned around a lot,
even though it would deserve to be mentioned on its own as well.
Every song seems to be written on the acoustic guitar
and its strumming is still the basic backbone of all songs. In addition to
the harmony singing of Cadiz and Stendhal, which has the added advantage
that one of the twos voice sounds female, they throw in a couple of
instruments ranging from the obvious (drum machine, kiddie piano, flute) to
some more unpredictable things (the aforementioned Kazoo, real drums, more
keyboards). And they try to keep the songs changing and structurally
interesting. And they do. As far as songwriting goes, they have inhaled the
classical book of children’s songs, have visitied the Randy Newman
masterclass and then spent a sabbatical researching the Sixties conservative
songwriters (those opposed to the randomness of Bob Dylan and
drawn to the structural adhesiveness of Burt Bacharach).
