This record by brother and sister duo, Frank and Anna Carey from Chicago, is a very bizarre listening experience.
A cinematic overture leads into a theatrical power ballad (Your Mere Presence) which provides the first taste of Frank's strange vocal phrasing and features intoxicated lines about the slavish worship of a woman whose virtues give "proof of God's existence".
This track sets the tone for the heady and very wordy collection of torch songs about death, despair and tortured love. The concept and delivery is so OTT that you feel it must be a grandiose spoof.
It has the feel of a concept album with a kind of offbeat music hall quality without the charm. The best thing you can say about it is that it is a one-off, but originality does not always go hand in hand with quality and certainly doesn't here.
The siblings describe the project as a story of a fictional sixties icon brooding over an unfulfilled past and preparing for an imminent death. This doesn't allow much scope for laughs and one liners to lighten the mood are thin on the ground unless you count Will You Marry Me? where the singer pleas desperately to be cherished until he perishes.
At the same time, Frank Carey's vocals , a weird cross between Steve Harley and Marc Almond, are so heavily stylised that you think he surely cannot be as serious as he sounds.
It is his voice that dominates. Only one track (Summer's Gone) features Anna Carey on lead vocals. This is a pity because she has a natural sweetness that provides a much needed foil to highly mannered singing of her brother.
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Can't Sleep is typical of the mood. This finds Frank in a severe lovesick state complaining of recurring panic attacks and musing disconsolately (and a little too convincingly) "I don't think I'll be here for long".
Syncom is one of three instrumentals and is like a modern day Joe Meek number complete with tacky sounding synthesizer. The dense DIY production is probably intended to sound like The Beach Boys but more the ornate lo-fi more closely resembles Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti.
For the most part, Frank sounds like someone suffering for his art and by the end it feels like the kindest thing would be for someone to put him out of his misery.
The epic final track (The Death Of An American) grinds on tortuously for around 15 minutes and contains about four alternate endings like it is frantically seeking closure.
It brings to an end an oddball album which I can only describe as an ambitious failure.
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