#1790 Van Dyke Parks - Song Cycle

That I could turn off my mind, let this hot mess flow all over me - someday I might come to love it.

But Jesus Joseph and Mary and all the goddamn saints, what a mess. Parks's cloying crooning manhandling syllables like a sitcom-bad kisser making his big move - too much mouth, too much motion, too much..trying. Strings, horns, incidental noise, everything else slathered over top like thick, cheap gravy, all atumble, like nobody talked to eachother beforehand and nobody who gave a shit put it all together afterward.

Was the near-complete lack of drums a stylistic choice, do you think? They probably would have helped keep some of this shit on the same beat // page.

Maybe this is all part of its charm, some prescient notion of twee. Maybe it's all artful genius, a reckless disregard for convention while paying tribute to the song styles the past! Whadda paradox! And I guess I dig it's sense of LA place when I can dig it out of the tarpits.

But mostly it just seems sloppy as shit, like lower-tier Zappa or Rundgren. It makes my face make a face, like I just watched a bad kisser making his big move 2.5/5