The Paper Chase
Someday This Could All Be Yours Vol. 1
Rating: 4.0
Label: Kill Rock Stars
John Congleton has an auteur’s eye for detail and motif. Like the best of filmmakers, his songs with The Paper Chase are densely packed with obsessive compulsive reiterations of concepts, sounds and textures; on the albums before Someday This Could All Be Yours Vol. 1, it wasn’t uncommon to hear backwater evangelists’ rants segue into piano lines more rhythmic than melodic, the hiss of their old recordings fleshing out the material while their bile-drenched words echoed around the corners. Though the publicity material for their most recent work tries to claim that the album finds the band working in simpler, less epic territory, that isn’t exactly true.
Someday is just as sprawling and dense as anything the Paper Chase have done before, it’s just that the process seems a little smoother this time around, with the found sounds and obliterated samples used less frequently and to greater effect than before. Congleton’s knack for appropriating traditional songs and classics to his own image in particular is more polished on this effort, whether it’s the “Stand By Me” cribbing rhythm and bass line on “If Nobody Moves Nobody Will Get Hurt (The Extinction)” or the surprise outro of “He’s got the whole world/ In his hands” within “The Small of Your Back The Nape of Your Neck (The Blizzard).”
The real appeal of Congleton’s group has always been the slightly off-kilter nature of their structures, though Congleton’s voice has a brilliant Texas twang to it that makes his melodies and words all the more interestingly rough, sweet enough to juxtapose the bitter machinations of the rhythm section and the haunting pianos but still throaty enough to hold its own. One gets the sense that if Congleton were happier, he’d have been the writer of choice for some pop songstress or another, a modern day Burt Bacharach. Lucky for us, Congleton is an angry bastard, barely able to contain his utter disdain for all of humanity who he chastises for “trying to ignore/ That [they're] all aboard the Titanic” that is planet Earth.
Admittedly, in the past that anger sometimes bordered on the ridiculous, coming across as just slightly above the dark poetry of some bullied teenager; but with Someday, Congleton has utilized his unifying motif of disasters to give the songs a sense of cohesion and relevance. The subject matter feels vital, with Congleton singing as though his life is on the line; “I’m Going to Heaven With or Without You (The Forest Fire)” especially sounds like a raucous anthem, grounded by a chorus built around a jaunty, chirping piano line and particularly cinematic strings that eventually feed into a hooky as fuck, Eastern-tinged violin part that will get stuck in your head during the day and haunt your dreams at night in the best possible way.
The only real flaw with The Paper Chase this time around is that Congleton and his crew have constructed such a perfect side A that the second half of the album can’t help but pale in comparison. How do you follow up a first half so full of energy and bile? You can’t replicate it, that’d be cheating; especially when that first half has moments like the Danny Elfman-esque barnstormer “The Common Cold (The Epidemic)” or the Beatles-on-morphine wonder of “The Laying of Hands The Speaking in Tongues (The Mass Hysteria.” Despite the synth-soaked whimsy at the heart of “What Should We Do With Your Body? (The Lightning)” and the out-there skeletal rhythms of “The Small of Your Back The Nape of Your Neck (The Blizzard),” Someday’s second half just doesn’t hold up to the perfectly sequenced beginning of the album.
Regardless, Someday This Could All Be Yours Vol. 1 is a triumph for The Paper Chase, easily capable of pushing them closer to the levels of some of their more notable peers like Cursive. And with the world going to hell in a hand basket currently, what perfect timing!
by Morgan Davis
