LA FA CONNECTED - urban

(CD, la fa connected)

Entrance one: The city is the place to be. Everybody wants to be in the city. Those who aren’t mostly, and those who are long for bigger cities, more liberties, more possibilities, more freedom sustained by the anonymity of never getting to know your neighbor not after ten years of living next door. The big lights, the big top, the big scenery. Everything is bigger in the cities. Entrance two: You can only judge the merits of city life when having access to rural space just as you can only judge the merits of the country life when spending time and time again in the city. The longing for people working in the city to live somewhere it’s green and have their kids grow up not in the danger of the city but also not in the imminent danger of the country will pose bigger problems in the years to come.

Anyway, taking country and city as semantic signifiers for something bigger than mere geography and infrastructure, then we see that the dimensions of both places are as contrary, complex and contrasting against each other as they are inside their own symbolism. Token exit: the size of a compound dwelling or the number of people confined within the arbitrary border of city limits does not constitute any kind of characteristic for what “urban” means. (except in the rather boring sense of professional city developers.) Cologne might be a smaller city than Vienna but that doesn’t make it more urban. Well, let’s not dwell on the flair or the history of Vienna, because this review is about indie-rock, after all, and that is an universal language for well-educated kids.

La Fa Connected lay down ten songs of finely distilled, guitar-oriented pop-music that uses the dynamics of Mars Volta to produce the laid back atmosphere of The Shins. Sometimes they stack up cleverly clicking arrangements, where the instruments work together like a machinery built by Shellac’s younger brothers, at other times they are jangly like The Warmers or The Dusters or some other mid-era Dischord pop-band. The singer sometimes loses the correct accent and stresses the ends of some words like any decent punk singer from a german speaking country would do, just to fall into a unique pose of shouting the next moment. Sometimes the band dangles along like they are taking a slow walk, only to start running the next second. But no matter how energetic or laid back the songs are at any given moment, the atmosphere remains warm, encompassing and peaceful.

And, like the bands mentioned above, I don’t believe that La Fa Connected will ever stand out from the crowd, though I am also sure they’ll always provide a good time. But I am terribly bad at such prognoses, believe me. Twenty years ago I was sure that nobody but a handful of people will ever hear of a band called Red Hot Chili Peppers (and for some years I was right…). And I also was sure that Modest Mouse would make their way into the charts in no time (I still got some time left there.)

Indie-rock, songs about relationships and the way they seem to flow by in urban areas without leaving a bigger dent, nothing that couldn’t be reshaped within a couple of days, melodies and clever arrangements for the basid band line-up – what exactly is new and exciting about this band? To be honest, nothing much, but there is something in the way they mix the ingredients so perfectly, something in the way this album flows with a steady curve and leaves you with a nice taste and a good feeling is something special. These days it seems as if I am listening to more and more music that is broken at its core, either by being very noisy or very chaotic or just very weird, and then some music that tries to seal the cracks and holes is very welcome. It is like taking a walk in green fields after spending some hectic days in the noise and dirt of the city.