“I think I chill you to the bone…” Really? Sorry, that’s more James Morrison’s line. If it weren’t so insufferably in love with itself, you could almost accept it as a kind of joke, but weary pantomime of The Tyburn Jig is so insufferably and self-adoringly theatrical that you it’s impossible to not see it as someone’s very intense, very personal take on being a villain straight out of vaudeville.
You think that’s my opinion? There’s a track on the record boasting the neologic title ‘Vaudevillain’. Why do bands do things like this? I looked in vain for the words “The original cast recording…” somewhere on the sleeve but it was nowhere to be found. Yes, it’s reasonably well played, fairly diverse in instrumentation and there’s maybe one track that is probably preferable to being slowly stoned to death (note the word “slowly”), that track being ‘The Book of Dust’, which is maybe a kind of rag time fun that would play well live. Everything else is wrong. You won’t hear a worse track this year than ‘Creep Show’ with its “I heart Tom Waits” vocal, unless maybe it’s ‘The Confession’, the title of which reminded me of the Hal Hartley film Henry Fool in which the title character has spent his life writing a confession that will blow the collective mind of the literary world only to fail to blow the mind of his best friend.
The production is oddly distancing making everything sound even more precious and artificial than it is. The vocals are filled with lots of Bill Sykes pseudo-phlegm and the lyrics are like a less self-aware Sondheim writing for children he hates. Oh and it’s supposed to be an exemplar of a genre called “steam punk”. Never heard of it. Never going to. Avoid.
