Sorry to push in here, not as an Album Club member, but as a long-time admirer of Penguin Café Orchestra. Nor can I compete with InnerSpace's excellent review, but I'd certainly endorse his mention of PCO's later albums: the self-titled and
Signs of Life are more accessible and completely instrumental, (as long as your definition of "instrument" is pretty broad.)
Knowing what they would later do makes this album under review feel a Little like a rehearsal in which they were trying out a couple of things before discovering what worked and what didn't. Their music was quite experimental, and of course not every experiment results in success, but if you like rubbersoul's "Best Tracks" picks, you'll find plenty of similar material on their later albums. You could even dip into this thread, for which PCO were the starting point:-
http://www.musicbanter.com/avant-gar...r-s-guide.html
I notice that Neapolitan didn't take to this album, and I'd like to pick up on a couple of points he mentions:-
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Originally Posted by Neapolitan
Somewhere I saw it said they were discribed as "Avant-garde Pop" another place I saw them "Instrumental Folk." This is too far removed from "Folk" for me to consider it as such. Other than using a fiddle which is one of the go-to instruments in Folk, there is very tenuous connection to the genre. OK I see them calling this "Avant-garde Pop" but being both is part of its demise.
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^ IMO the genre labels are all a bit misleading - the PCO aren't really delivering pop or folk and are only sporadically avantgarde. For me their approach was to strip away a lot of musical preconceptions and build things up again with delicate care from the basics; from what I saw of 70's music, (mooching around record shops, for example), there was nobody else playing music the way main-man Simon Jeffes was composing it, and record-shop owners just didn't know which section to put the PCO albums in. Their dilemma wasn't solved until New Age became a genre.
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I was set up to like it only to get put off by annoying part of it. Another thing is that the instruments didn't match or something with the mix that didn't gel right. The music at best sounded like a incoherent mess.
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^ Oddly enough, the instrumentation is one of the things I really love about PCO; it's kind of quirky, but you can hear what each instrument is doing. I like that clear, clean sound that lets you hear how the songs are put together from the various instrumental parts.
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It is like they are stealing ideas from The Beatles or emulating some Pop band and then riffing off of them for a while then go into a Avant-garde mode for a while. There's always a music idea developing but it going nowhere. It does this over and over again. There's somewhat of a hook, it repeats and builds then it falls apart it becomes either whimsical or inane. That becomes annoying after a while. There is some nice stuff on it where I could love the album if wasn't for all the BS every other minute. However that makes it very consistent throughout, the way music vacillates between mushy melodies and random wankery. And if anything positive can be said about the album it'd be that it is consistent.
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^ Yes, I agree with you here, Neapolitan. The big weakness of PCO is that a lot of their material sounds very inconsequential; ideas remain undeveloped and they never go for the big, powerful emotional impact so that their music, although often touching on beauty, is always determinedly cerebral. Listening to a PCO album usually puts me in the mood to play something hard and heavy as an antidote to all their refined, clever simplicity.
I'm pretty lousy at putting a number to a listening experience, so my verdict shifts between Anteater's
strong 7 and rubbersoul's
8.5, settling therefore at Trollheart's
8 I suppose.