Forest Fire – Staring at the X
It seemed safe to believe from 2009’s Survival that Forest Fire would make a name for themselves as next in a line of successful folksy indie outfits, all elbows, cross-stitch and slide guitar, that would alternately jangle and coo their way into our hearts.
Staring at the X turns its back on this winning trajectory, however, instead offering a more disjunctive and yet labored album that attempts to expand upon this formula but in the end fails to play to their strengths. Steeped in noisy effects and intentional lo-fi, the album nonetheless feels overproduced as the tracks follow one another with neither the spontaneity of Survival nor any semblance of intrinsic logic. The album is unique in its 90s mixtape quality, but all of its eclecticism doesn’t really translate to something resembling growth; on the contrary, it feels, among other things, like an anachronism.
Staring at the X retains flashes of Forest Fire’s knack for gritty sentimentalism, and these moments do show potential to be redeeming factors, but their scope ends there—they are ultimately too fragmentary, like the rest of the album, and their placement amidst that tomfoolery undoes any staying power they might otherwise have. I’m talking about tracks that recall some of 2009’s laconic balladry, such as the title track, “Mtns Are Mtns,” or even the plodding “Visions in Plastic”—on which Mark Thresher’s vocals channel both Jerry Garcia and indie rock’s short lived contribution to the blue-eyed soul revival (does anyone still remember Cold War Kids?) in their folkish cadence and nasal croon. But it doesn’t jive with the rest of the tracks, fuzz-laden and with a frequently incongruous thread of bassy dance beat-ness (as in “Future Shadows,” “They Pray Execution Style”), which sadly undercut the record’s, and arguably the group’s, potential.
2 / 5 bars
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