Deas Vail – Birds And Cages

Deas Vail

Birds and Cages

Mono Vs Stereo Records

Rating:

I have a pet bird.  It’s name is Bird.  It is kind of the like the bird on the cover of the new Deas Vail album Birds and Cages, except it lives in it’s cage, not on top of it.  And it doesn’t wear an undersized top-hat, although that would make Bird an arguably better pet.  Unlike the new Deas Vail album, Bird doesn’t have much of an ear for melody.  He mostly just screeches a lot.

Deas Vail definitely pulled out the big guns with Birds and Cages: a guest vocal from Matt Thiessen (Relient K), instrumentation that plays off of each other yet is still tight, interesting melodies and incredible vocal control.  Though I don’t have much of a knowledge of the band, or any previous works, the album sounds fairly experimental.  There are some areas where it pays off, and some where it sounds like they didn’t quite know where to go with it.

“The Things You Were” starts the album off feeling good.  Not attempting some overdone introduction, the song grooves along smoothly setting the tone of the album.  “Excuses” does a good job at keeping the verses tight and interesting while keeping the groove.  Unfortunately, I feel the transition into the chorus is a little awkwardly executed and less effective than it could’ve been.  “Cages” and “Birds” are both songs that are fantastically composed.  The songs both fluidly change pace when it comes time to do so, and Matt Thiessen’s guest vocal on “Cages” is used well.  Without a different voice, I think the part would’ve been less effective.

While the album has a lot of strong moments, it has it’s fair share of weaknesses.  Maybe it’s eccentric opening guitar riff on “Growing Pains”, or the falsetto in the chorus, but this is one of those songs where it just sounds like the band weren’t quite sure what to do.  This chorus could’ve been so much bigger, and it felt as though the song were building up to one, but just dropped off.

Perhaps another issue I have with this album is that it doesn’t really feel like it goes anywhere.  Each song is it’s own entity, without really building off the last.  The use of the transition piece “Tell Me” could have been more successful if the album felt like one large entity, but it simply just feels like something they decided to throw in the middle to transition into the latter half of the album.

“Sunlight” finally brings back the groove that I missed from the first few songs and the middle few.  Unfortunately the guitar part, heard right in the beginning of the song is used to transition between sections of the song, and just comes off as being weird and out of place.

Ultimately, the album seems to want to go somewhere, but never really gets there.  A valiant effort indeed, but somewhat difficult to digest.  There are a few hints throughout the album of where they were trying to go, but with such an inconsistent ability to keep the feeling going throughout the album, I can’t help but be a little skeptical.  Not enough songs soar/too many songs feel caged.  Yeah, I just used their own album title to explain how I felt about the album, but it kind of makes sense to me.
—-Written By Rob P.