Review: James Ferraro - Far Side Virtual (Hippos in Tanks)
Even though it was like $25, I simply had to buy James Ferraro’s Last American Hero LP when I found it at Amoeba Records in San Francisco this summer. The album art was a photo of a Ford F-150 pick-up truck in a Best Buy parking lot next to some crappy renderings of the FOX Sports logo and the network’s dancing robot that accompanies their NFL football broadcasts. Inside the sleeve was a fascinating, hilarious liner note explanation of the album’s songs penned by Ferraro that, among other things, extolled the metaphorical qualities of an empty Monster energy drink can.
Far Side Virtual, Ferraro’s newest record, is described by the label as a 21st century still-life. While some of the synth-heavy sounds might evoke an 80s feel at first, the record’s obsession with contemporary tech is clear. At one point during album closer “Solar Panel Smile,” the Windows start-up theme is recreated on piano, the order of the four immediately recognizable notes occasionally jumbled and sped up into a flurry.
Some of these tunes are like blown-up Walgreen’s cosmetic aisle jams. “Fro Yo and Cellular Bits” has a catchy synth lead augmented by fake strings, with an underlying arpeggiated counter melody that that has the timbre of a ringtone. The context of the song is kind of ambiguous—for a song with such a funny title, the synth tones and meandering song structure seem to be aiming for a higher brow—so it’s hard to know if the desired effect is humor or serious examination of contemporary tech-obsession. It’s kinda like that album of totally honest AM gold tunes Tim Heidecker recently put out with some guy who wasn’t Eric Wareheim that held back just enough to not be distractingly silly, but didn’t really register as effective classic rock songwriting either.
The ambition is golden, but trying to recontextualize the timbres and tones of today’s commonplace technological pastiche is an uphill battle. Hearing cell phone tones and the harmlessly tweaked MIDI horns one might hear on an employee training video simply feels pedestrian, because the purpose of these sounds is almost irrevocably pedestrian. Ferraro tries to alter these conditions and at times reaches an exciting alchemy of commercial flotsam and sonic disorientation, like with the driving pulse and fluttery textures of “Palm Trees, Wi-Fi, and Dream Sushi.” But the aim of compelling compositions is at serious odds with the limited potential of these inundated sounds.
Ferraro is unquestionably exploring ground untouched by most of the ambient/noise/sound collage field and his honest interest in these textures is made apparent on the record: no exploitative retro cheese, no eye-wink samples, no retread pop culture residue. But like Last American Hero, my curiosity and intrigue are piqued more by the ideas suggested by Far Side Virtual’s album art and song titles than most of the jams themselves. These compositions would be more effective if implemented in the visual art or installation realm, where Ferraro’s encapsulation of 2011 post-Internet commercial anxiety could be rendered in an HD vocabulary.
