Portugal. The Man - Waiter: You Vultures!

Portugal. The Man has a solid foundation for their model home of a CD, Waiter: You Vultures!. But all the rooms look very similar, and after a while, the homey yet homely voices (shrill one second, cooing the next) are claustrophobic and tiresome. It’s seems quite lively and livable, and Portugal. The Man gets the most out of the acoustics with some creative floor design, but the next minute, the wiring short-circuits again, and the toilet backs up. I want to like this CD, and I have no trouble listening to it, but I can’t find something good to say about it. Solid, but empty, this is a doll’s house—all exteriors, with fragile fillings. At the same time, Portugal, The Man does a lot with emptiness: In “AKA M80 The Wolf” the vocals duck out for a moment and take the electric and bass with them. In their absence, the faint guitar-like plunking of keys lights the room, allowing for a layered texture as the other instruments return, one by one. Suddenly, with “Elephants,” we’re doing the same thing again - slow beats leaping into an up-tempo folk rock. Even the choruses themselves, while catchy, are quickly redundant, due mostly to the gravel-like intonations of the singers. These cracked wailings will be endearing to some, but it’s just cheap wallpaper for yet another duplicate room. The experimentation that Portugal. The Man finally opts for, in “Guns...Guns...Guns” is enough to make me shut up. That is, I would hate to tempt this group to produce more garbage like this track, a long babble of nonsense paired with the discordant slams of an angry piano, not to mention low-budget static and other distortions. This in-joke of a song doesn’t distract from the faulty plumbing, and this ghost of half-finished material can be found even in good songs like “Waiter.” In sum, I’ve described an artist’s residence. Portugal. The Man has patched together a collection of songs that gets the job done, but just barely, and just enough to remind you how much you need to move to a bigger, better, brighter place. [www.portugaltheman.net]