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NATIONAL EYE
The Meter Glows (Feel)
Reviewed by DJ Johnson
For those with a lust for well-conceived psychedelia, National Eye might just be the best thing to come along in a ages. The first thing you need to know is their music is magical and it's very hard to resist falling under its spell. You should also know that these guys aren't prodigious players; in fact, if you divorce yourself from the astounding pastiche of sound they're creating and just concentrate on each instrument, you'll often notice some incredibly sloppy playing. I don't recommend doing that. It ruins a good thing, and for no good reason, because the final piece of the puzzle is that these five guys are recording artists who got into this line of work when someone gave them some portable recording studio gear. Instead of jamming on it, they learned to craft songs inside and out.
Each song on this, their debut album, has exactly what it needs just when it needs it. "NY Absentee" may seem minimalistic in general, but that electric sitar (or clever approximation of one) decorates it perfectly without distracting from the lyrics - and the lyrics are always important in National Eye's songs. "New Cinema River Murder Ballad" is an engrossing confession to an unsettling act made all the more unsettling by the most off-kilter organ solo to ever appear in a song this good, not to mention a vocal that sounds very much like Neil Young. "I made a poison from a fruit," Not Neil sings. "And I fed it to her inside a drink / The body posed a problem in my house / I Took her to the river and I threw her in it."
No, these guys aren't very apt to toss off songs overflowing with "baby" and "I don't mean maybe" anytime soon. Not when they have ideas like "Dracula's Always With Me," a clever song in which the singer speaks of his own bad behavior from drug and drink as if it were an undesirable "other," in this case Dracula. He sounds resigned as he tells us he saw his friend Dracula making out with the very girl he himself had been talking to all night at the party. "I sensed he would be comin' / when I heard there'd be a bar / Blades and powder on the table / Dracula's in charge." Later, when he sings "I've seen my friend Dracula make a virtue out of lust / He preys on my sense of defeat / I pray he'll turn to dust," it's clear this isn't a fun little novelty song at all; it's another cleverly written, meaningful song from National Eye on a debut album to remember.
© 2004 - DJ Johnson