The Chocula Hunt is pleased to introduce another gimmick to the blog in order to give the illusion of fresh and original content: the Myspace Monday. This weekly feature will provide exposure for bands found through aimless clicking on myspace which don't have very many play counts. Starting from a horrible dub reggae group's myspace, fifty degrees of friendship (and six wrong turns leading to male enhancement websites) lead me to ...
Coat
According to their myspace biography, Coat is the songwriting project of Chicagoan (is that a word?) Libby Reed, whose "ideas" are developed into actual songs in the studio with the help of some talented fiends. "Together", she writes "we make coat what it is - - a stiched rhythm of tones and harmony and ideas. ideas. ideas." And that's exactly what we hear in the tracks posted in her myspace: a lot of different ideas. Unfortunately for Libby, a math professor I had in college told me that "you have to have seven bad ideas before you have one really good one"; Libby's myspace has only three.
"Doodle" is not a bad idea, buts its not a fantastically good one either. It opens with a bouncy electronic bit that sounds like it could have been the overworld map music for an old NES RPG -- yes I played NES RPGs when I was a kid, you can stop laughing now. Libby's singing is amelodic on the verse, which fits nicely with the simple electronics and minimal percussion. A little splash of piano and we transition into the chorus: lyrics give way to melodic do-do-dos in three-part harmony, a xlyophone doubles the vocal melody, and this catchy movement gets punctuated with by a stab on the electric harpsichord. Its a bit verse-chorus-verse-chorusy though (God forbid anyone ever use such a structure, especially in a pop song) and might benefit from a little something something.
Coat's other tracks are neither bad nor good ideas. Rather, they are ideas of ideas in desperate need of more development. Strings and horns sway back and forth to a crawling drum beat on "Retrieve", which sounds like it would work well if you were trying to have an 8th grade slow dance in an old barn. "Happy Road" is equally slow, and if it weren't for the irritating swirling static in the background of the mix or the ocassional bass drum hit, I might have fallen asleep while listening to it (and I've had four cups of coffee today already). Libby's voice is really the only thing holding these tracks together.
After these last two tracks, I'm really left wondering: where are these "overwhelmingly talented" friends of hers that are supposed to be he helping develop these ideas. Scrolling down her page shows that in fact she is only one degree of myspace top-12 friendship away from Califone (which in turn makes Califone only 51 degrees away from The Zion Train ... ), whose previous effort, Roots and Crowns, was one of my favorite releases of 2006. Disappointingly, Libby's "talented friends" helping her out in the studio don't include any of the Califone boys, who have a knack for taking their vague ideas and reify them through the structure of folk and blues. This ability to make an idea more than just an idea is sorely lacking in Coat, and until the band finds a way to give Libby's ideas the structure they need (or unless Chocula Hunt's fanbase grows enormously), Coat seems destined to remain in the doldrums of myspace.
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