Forest Fire – Survival

The facts of Survival are fairly straightforward: Forest Fire, a New York 4-piece convened in rehearsal spaces in Brooklyn and Portland, placed a mic in the middle of the room and recorded the results. What they’ve created is something befitting the lo-fi folk ethos ”“ a 26-minute ramshackle, tumbledown album of heartfelt fragments. Survival is flawed and ragged round the edges and hovers over a bed of experimentation that certainly catches the ear, but ultimately it’s the victim of that lo-fi ethos ”“ i.e. it’s a bit of a mess.Across the nine tracks present, Survival moves from a stoned Beta Band groove on ‘I Make Windows’ to an almost southern noir sound on ‘Through My Gloves’ ”“ replete with a crying lap steel. The midway point is possibly ‘Promise’ which is an unsettling campfire jam relocated to The Velvet Underground and Nico via The Aeroplane Flew Over the Sea, with Mark Thresher intoning "I mean it when I say/she bit me with the teeth of an ungrateful dog" over the top in his best Lou Reed drawl. And in fact, The Velvets might be the safest touchstone here, though in truth the overall sound probably falls closer to Loaded than ”¦Nico.The best thing here is certainly the closing track ‘Slow Motion’, which puts me in mind of another record this year that had flashes of brilliance but finally suffered from a lack of focus and cohesion, and finished on a moment of genius ”“ Here We Go Magic. ‘Slow Motion’ is where everything fits- the egg-rolling-down-a-hill lope of the Mo Tucker biscuit tin drums, Thresher’s plaintive howl (‘if they don’t build banks by the freeway/if that don’t keep bullets on the bookcase/sweetheart, survival!’), that screed of feedback just beneath the surface of things”¦ It’s a superb closing track but it tends to throw a light backwards on just how much the earlier tracks failed to recognisably cohere.As a close to this I’m going to say that a little light research can be a dangerous thing. Lacking any background stuff on this at all, I looked on Rate Your Music to see what was what and saw this pithy comment: ‘Not bad but I'm pretty sure you can survive without it.’ And try as I might to improve upon that ”“ and harsh as it sounds - this review has been the reified process of me failing to do so. 70%Forest Fire on MySpace