There will occasionally come a time for every reviewer of music when they come across an album that has to be analyzed in terms of its individual tracks and not as a unit. Such is the case with Grey Revell’s Kamikaze, the fourth album from the New York songwriter. Kamikaze is undeniably a collection of well-written, well-performed tunes, but listens more like a compilation of singles from different points in the artist’s career than a cohesive album.
But if one listens with this in mind, the experience need not be any less rewarding. Kamikaze is Revell’s third collaborative effort with rotating backup band Cinema Fantastic, and the impressive ensemble of drums, bass, guitar, trumpet, synthesizer, organ, and various exotic percussion instruments push Revell’s melodic folk-rock to rock that much harder.
The record is by no means perfect; trouble does pop up occasionally. For example, there are a precious few spots on the album where the imagination invested in the lyrics falters slightly—“emotion” is rhymed with “devotion” on “Love Ain’t No Regular Gun,” and “faster” with “disaster” on “Kamikaze”—which is slightly surprising, given the rich lyrical intensity of Revell’s previous two endeavors, 2000’s critically acclaimed The Green Train and especially 1999’s Crazy Like an Ambush.
The weak points in the lyrics, however, are made up for by the energy of the music—“Gun” opens the album with two minutes of energetically strummed guitars and thunderous tom-toms, while the title track, the record’s longest, provides an increasingly distorted blend of guitars, drums, synths and voice that lasts nearly six minutes. Also amongst the album’s biggest standouts is “Manchester, England,” a song written by Revell’s singer/songstress wife, Patsy Grace, which oscillates in tone between a more leisurely incarnation of Belle and Sebastian’s “The Boy With the Arab Strap” and a punchier, more up-tempo “Eleanor Rigby.”
The whole of Kamikaze does not hang together in the way Ambush did, but the sum of the parts is still a more than worthwhile experience.
