[music] CHRIS BUTLER - The Museum Of Me (Future Fossil) (after five listens)

[dot_fennel]

Plenty of filler; Butler's experiments with antique recording technology (Edison cylinders and wire spools) take a few plays before you can even tell if they're good or not (mostly no) and the normal recordings aren't totally consistent, so... maybe half good. And yet, my only other post-1983 Butler experience was the record- and tolerance-shattering "The Devil Glitch", a 69-minute which met some Guinness Book-related standard for non-repetitiveness while simultaneously, in reality, repeating itself so badly that I yearned to turn it off well within the first 4 or 5 minutes.

Anyway, before he made deracinated aesthetic disasters, Butler wrote songs for the insidiously great Waitresses, whose "I Know What Boys Like" was only the tip of the prog-influenced Ohio art pop miceberg. So I had to give him another chance when I found this cheap.

The great songs here are the longest ones, and those succeed due to great arrangements and a nice understanding of when to throw in a new song-section to shake up the verse-chorus-verse. Those two qualities in ANY measurable quantity might have fixed The Devil Glitch. Ah, okay, enough. I just hated to see an underappreciated songwriter flop, and I hate it more now that I know he was still capable of doing better when he did.

Comments

[modpixie.livejournal.com]

chris butler is a friend and former neighbor of mine. i love his stuff, but his strong suit is that of arrangement...or at least the songs of his that i like best have good arrangements. i don't know that i would go so far as to call his work a series of "deracinated aesthetic disasters", but he can be a hit-and-miss kind of artist.

[dot_fennel]

Crap, why did I put that in the plural? The "disasters" thing was just a reference to The Devil Glitch. I can't think of anything else by him I've even really been disappointed by, though the recent Tin Huey rarities thing took some skipping around in to find the good parts, I thought.

I've occasionally tried scraping the web to find the Waitresses songs which aren't collected on the Polydor best-of, with no success.