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Reviews: Lisle Engle ~ California Miles
Posted on Saturday, May 03, 2008 @ 16:37:32 PDT
Topic: Reviews
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Artist: Lisle Engle
CD: California Miles
Home: Los Angeles, California
Style: AdultAlt Rock/ Pop
Quote: "It’s a great way to appreciate a really good stereo."
By Barney Quick
Listening to this record is much like the experience of going to an atmospheric, tastefully appointed restaurant, ordering a menu item expertly prepared from exquisite ingredients and not being able to detect any flavor. It’s a well-made album, but there’s not a lot of music there.
There are sound effects that tie the tracks together, ostensibly to give the whole album some kind of thematic continuity. The mountains-and-highway-sign photograph on the front cover and the rugged-seacoast photo on the back cover would seem to reinforce the album’s title, but there’s really nothing particularly California-miles-y about the lyrics to the songs.
Aurally, it’s a very pretty record. Engle has a background in sound engineering, and that’s reflected in the ultra-clean mixing job. The various instrumental layers are heard to the appropriate degree throughout, and the highs, midranges and lows are in perfect balance. Echo and up-front tracks are juxtaposed marvelously. It’s a great way to appreciate a really good stereo.
Engle and his band play the compositions wonderfully. Guitarist Pete Sjostedt contributes everything from cosmically crunchy distortion to lilting nylon-string flourishes in all the right places. Violinist Dorian Cheah, who records under his own name as well, mines the songs for as much musicality as he can, squeezing out some notably eloquent runs in response to various vocal lines. Guiseppe Patane’s bass is deep and sinewy and sometimes full of delightfully snaky syncopation. Engle’s rhythm guitar is dense and driving, and drummer Steve Holmes knows how to impart dynamic variation in the service of a song’s particular sections.
Even from a structural standpoint, these songs exhibit admirable craftsmanship. The refrains are hook-laden, the verses ride along rockingly on Engle’s riffs, and, for all the attention to atmosphere, there’s no gratuitous meandering.
It’s on the level of substance that this record ultimately denies the listener satisfaction.
It is one of those albums that struts its best stuff in the first few songs. The chord changes to “Somebody Help” are simple, but well-assembled. If Engle had opened the proceedings with this and then moved into some other harmonic and melodic territory, it would have been a nice component of the overall project. “Gonna Be Sure” starts with the promise of something with an uptempo difference, but when the refrain comes around, one is thinking, “Didn’t we go here in the first tune?” The fourth tune, “Inside 4 U,” is distinguished by the tabla, shaker percussion, intertwining guitars and the upturning “Goodbye, babe” vocal lick, but melodically it revisits the mixolydian terrain we’ve covered in every cut so far (and will get lost in - like a California desert - for most of the rest of the album).
There’s a chord change - from a tonic to a major chord a whole step below it -that, when used judiciously, has a nice aesthetic impact. The problem here is that, after a few tracks, the listener finds himself saying “Oh, no, he’s not going there again, is he?” It gets to the point where not even the most furiously passionate violin line can save it.
Engle is a first-rate sound engineer with a fairly developed pop-alt-rock sensibility, some guitar chops within a certain range, and a knack for putting together an ensemble of good musicians. The question is, what did he want to do with all these elements at his disposal? One senses that his main interest in music is how it enters the ears rather than where it goes within the listener after that. California Miles is an impressive record in many ways; it’s just not very memorable.
Artist Website: http://www.lisleengle.com
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