One Ring Zero - Wake Them Up

One Ring Zero’s latest, Wake Them Up, is a lot like The Arcade Fire’s Funeral, but without all the poetic lyrics: this is a distilled album more interested in experimenting with French-fusion than singing about it. When there are words, they’re half-spoken and half-sung; rarely do they shift out of a one-octave range. The result is a series of fifteen zippy songs, three minutes at most, that range from hopeful instrumental segues (“Happy New Year”) to melancholy string choruses (“Karen”) and experimental sounds, as with the eighteen seconds of vegetative percussion on “Johnny.” Other tracks are playful dirges: a low-fi tuba performance in “Lost,” depressed circus music on “The Sad Carousel.” Some songs are made up of their moods, like the eerie synthesized soundscape of “Robert Hunter’s Monster.” And then some are too good to be mistaken for the happy accident of a jam session: just listen to the melodious, surging pulse of “The Chinese Pavilion” or the haunting lyrics (those “Styrofoam eyes”) of “The Queen of Displays.” The one persistent element is the mood, a down-tempo hodgepodge of experimental tracks that chop up the narrative flow of the album. Is One Ring Zero trying to be serious? This is, after all, the group that made a CD using lyrics contributed by authors and called it lit-rock. "This Ain't No Love Song" may be earnest, but it still comes across as a parody of the blues, and it’s hard to hear the use of that distinct New Orleans rhythm in “Here Come the Mannequins” as anything but jazzercise. And yet “A Moving World” is unmistakably a ballad and “The Silver Girl” has an exotic romanticism to it: both are excellent, solid tracks. In fact, the majority of Wake Them Up is very palatable. Given that, their intent isn’t even all that important, is it: just enjoy their postmodern musical compromise between the past and present as is. [www.oneringzero.com]