Release Date: April 26, 2011
Skeletons new album, People, pushes beyond what typical guitar, bass, keys, drums and vocals can do. This album goes right to your head. Just from the cover (an amalgamation of different people sewn together to form one singular Frankenstein-esque face), you’ll realize that even if you’re a person who listens to this alone in your room every night with headphones, you’re still part of the human experience in a very particular way.
Lyrically, this album is one giant story that sounds like a mix between transcriptions of news reports and slam poetry. However, the lyrics are delivered straight-faced by the band’s singer without screams or any studio effects and, most of the time, in a spoken-word way.
The songs on People are extremely minimal, but they take listeners somewhere and can leave them feeling suspended in an ethereal place of their own imagination.
The terrible things Skeletons sing about start appearing from the very first line of the album: “Little Rich got his face shot off.” The instrumentals on People are repetitive and catchy, and it works together to keep the focus on the lyrics, but you’ll get the various little piano hooks, and finger-tapped guitar riffs stuck in your head after the first listen.
The strange thing is that this album has the same sort of single-note mayhem on guitar that it does on piano. When the two instruments combine, forces on songs such as, “Walmart and the Ghost of Jimmy Damour” make you wonder what this band is doing. Were they together when they recorded this? Is the writing from personal experience or newspaper headlines? Are they insane?
The songs on People sound like Explosions in the Sky found a loop pedal and started dissecting their songs to create new collages with the little pieces. Each song is totally unique from the others, and Skeletons are extremely talented at their instruments. Nothing on this album sounds sloppy or out of place. The production is professional, and it doesn’t try to cover up mistakes or a lack of original songwriting.
If you are to listen to this album from start to finish as a whole, you’re not the same person coming out. The lyrics make you wonder about everyone you see on the street and their lives. It makes you take a look at the people around you and actually wonder what makes them tick. On top of that, the songs have small brushstroke details in the instrumental work that the band added, such as on “Tania Head,” that make the track stick out.
Whether it’s a flurry of notes plucked staccato style for one quick second or an unexpected pause in the melody or beat, it never hurts the song or seems thrown in at the last minute. Everything Skeletons does here is top-notch and has created a massive album with tons of replay value.
Skeletons – People Tracklisting:
- “L’il Rich”
- “Grandma”
- “More Than the One Thing”
- “Walmart and the Ghost of Jimmy Damour”
- “No”
- “Tania Head”
- “Barack Obama Blues”
- “People”
