Dorks And Losers

It’s been four years since The Forms’ highly-acclaimed debut album Icarus was released. It’s been well worth the wait, but for the quar­tet, mak­ing the album was a gru­el­ing piece of work that rivaled some movie pro­duc­tion sched­ules with the band spend­ing 50 straight days in the stu­dio. Front­man Alex Tween says it was worth it because “we’re really proud of how it came out.”

Nor­mally a band shouldn’t have to spend that much time in the stu­dio, but the mem­bers of The Forms (Tween — gui­tar, Jack­son Kenny — bass, Bren­dan Kenny — gui­tar, and Matt Walsh — drums) are com­pletists when it comes to their music. And it shows, despite the album’s aver­age run­ning time.

The open­ing track “Knowl­edge In Hand” has the per­fect blend of sim­plis­tic rep­e­ti­tion, while the sub­se­quent tracks “Alpha” and “Red­gun” fol­low the intro pat­tern with a more laid-back feel. Together, the three cre­ate the per­fect sound­track flash­back to col­lege life with their vary­ing speed-ups and slow-downs.

Con­sis­tency is the heart of the band’s self-titled sopho­more album, and by the time you notice, all twelve songs are over. Every song seems to build on the pre­vi­ous one, yet still remain in a har­mo­nized straight.

There’s an under­ly­ing firm­ness to Alex’s vocals, as if he wants to be mel­low, but also tries to make sure that you are actu­ally feel­ing mel­low. “Bones” is a good exam­ple where Alex is direct in his lyrics while the accom­pa­ny­ing instru­ments sound almost the oppo­site. You can sense this more in the next track “Blue Whale” where Alex’s repeated “No, no, no, no’s” sound unyield­ing, albeit more like the unyield­ing “no’s” by a some­one who is drunk try­ing to pass on another beer while every­one around him is yelling “chug, chug, chug.” But that’s not the point.

I think ana­lyz­ing this album song-by-song is futile because of its amaz­ingly utter even­ness. Tween even describes the actual com­plex­ity of the songs by them “hav­ing parts [that] work with each other organ­i­cally and actu­ally make sense.” This type of artistry and show­man­ship seems ever more rel­e­vant in the world of heavily-produced and constantly-rotated radio pop tracks.

[pho­tos via Sneak Attack Media]
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Track list:

1. Knowl­edge In Hand
2. Alpha
3. Red Gun
4. Focus
5. Borges
6. Bones
7. Blue Whale
8. Blue Whale
9. Ober­lin
10. Trans­mis­sion
11. White Dot
12. Get­ting It Back

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