Andrew Vladeck tries. On his debut album, The Wheel, he tries. You can tell that he sings what he feels and he feels what he sings. It’s just too bad that his feelings are largely indistinguishable from everyone else’s, and expressed about as well–common, cliche, and obviously stylized. A lot of his songs start off promisingly. (Well, the songs where he doesn’t launch immediately into verse–) Once he opens his mouth, though, the music is is terrible. Wordy, terrible, A-level (granted) open mic terrible. If he randomly eliminated half his lyrics’ words, they would be much better. Ask Eliot. It helps, sometimes. (Vladeck is no Eliot.)
Most of the songs sound like Vladeck took a big hit from the Bob Dylan bong. His vocal delivery style is the aural equivalent of floppy hair, though. This is coming from someone who would self-describe as having floppy hair: It is self-consciously bad. His singing is artificialized–forced atavism in an reactive age. Nostalgic for conversations he had yesterday, if you know what I mean. When he’s not sounding like he’s sounding like Dylan, Vladeck ends up sounding like the guy from Train, another self-consciously bad singer.
Vladeck’s vocal delivery is bad–not so much because it’s bad (lots of singers pull that off well). It’s that the approach is so obvious and lazy as to be insulting to listeners who have ever previously listened to music. Vladeck could excel, perhaps, at prenatal listening–Now That’s What I Call Dylanesque, Vol. 0! That’s not the worst of it, though. His lyrics are actually terrible, as well. “Waiting For The Coffee To Kick In” could be called “Waiting For Starbucks To Option My Song.” It is about absolutely nothing and in the most annoying way possible. “These Streets” actually invokes “angelheaded hipsters” in an unironic fashion. “Picking Apples In Orange County” has a groan of a title and is filled with similar ‘word play:’ free associations about fruit names and some dead (from overuse!) allusions to The Garden. (Did you know about that chick named Eve and that fruit she picked?) “Chinatown” is just plain insulting. A monstrous admixture of Orientalism and hamfisted (hammouthed?) lyrics about how it’s a long way to China from… Chinatown? It sounds like the kind of thing someone would write on his first day in the city.
The problems with The Wheel are profound, but they’re not necessarily its fault. Rather, The Wheel’s faults have to do with our era. It’s like popping a black and white filter on an otherwise boring photograph and expecting the results to evoke Weegee, Robert Frank, or Brassï. It’s just not going to happen. Those guys had talent and they just happen to be of a different era. Simply making your object appear to be from a different era cannot make it intrinsically better. Bob Dylan started out singing folk songs, but he ended up writing some of the most memorable songs of the 20th century. And now we have fucking distressed jeans, iPhone apps that try to turn digital photos into polaroids, and shitty contemporary music that sounds old (and shitty). It’s too bad that Vladeck even opens his mouth, as his instrumentation is actually very good. He should look into a career as a solo instrumentalist, although it likely wouldn’t occur to him.