Thing a Week Four

Album Review

Finishing off his string of song-per-week albums, Jonathan Coulton takes a little piece of everything he's touched upon in previous albums and puts the influences together. There's some pathos and some power pop; there are love songs, singer/songwriter ballads, and heavily overhauled cover songs. The album opens with a power pop bit devoted to the joys of SkyMall shopping, followed by a slightly heart-wrenching ballad to the male seahorse as he's abandoned by the female. After a creepy turn courtesy of some excellent use of minor chords in "Creepy Doll," one of the best compositions of the albums is presented, a singer/songwriter ballad to a Sasquatch that invokes a bit of a backing band and a small, light crew of backup singers in "Under the Pines." Just after the fairly quirky Bigfoot love song, self-defeatism gets a round of power pop par excellence in "Big Bad World One." It's this constant mix of silliness in lyrical content and deeper, heartfelt emotions and allegories to the follies of human experience that really encapsulates Coulton's work. Always wrapped up in an arrangement worthy of more mainstream success ("Pull the String" could very well have been a Foo Fighters hit), the songs flow along their various courses, some paying tribute to classic artists or their general aesthetics, some entirely original in form, some outright corny with a wink to the audience. Power pop constantly mixes with nonstandard content (catalog shopping in "SkyMall," dystopian chaos in "The Big Boom"); gorgeous sensitive ballads mix with calculated hatred in "Make You Cry." Each installation in the Thing a Week series is something of a mixed bag in form, content, and genre, and this one is no exception. However mixed the bag is, though, the quality is almost constantly high. The full series should be recommended listening for anyone investigating where indie music can really go when it lets go of the pretensions that tend to accompany it.