Hoosiers, The - The Trick to Life (Album)
I’m always a little bit wary of bands that use epithets like ‘quirky’ or ‘odd’ to describe their music. More often than not, these bands are about as quirky as Alexander Downer, and would not know the meaning of the word odd if a Residents album jumped up and gave them a haircut.
Such is the case with The Hoosiers who have in fact invented a new genre – ‘odd pop’. Well, their debut album, The Trick to Life is a collection of eleven songs of obvious normalcy. The only hint of oddness comes from front man Irwin Sparkes, who is doing his best to sound like the bastard love child of Robert Smith and Jeff Buckley. However, unlike Smith and Buckley, there is an innate soullessness and lack of feeling to his warblings. In fact, the more Sparkes flexes that annoyingly overdone falsetto of his, the more this reviewer thinks, ‘clippety clop, clippety clop, it’s the sound of the one trick pony.’
Musically, ‘The Trick to Life’ offers little in the way of originality with the band pilfering with gay abandon. The album’s opener and single ‘Worried about Ray’, has the Turtles written all over it. Or even XTC at a stretch. The introspective melancholia of Radiohead also gets the Hoosiers treatment on ‘Run Rabbit Run’, and if 'Cops and Robbers’ isn’t The Cure’s ‘Love Cats’ then I’m not here. So what is the result of this fervent musical revisionism? An album that’s all over the place and a band that are desperately trying to find their sound.
I was expecting ‘The Trick to Life’ to offer up some funky moments, considering it was produced by Jamiroquai keyboardist and sometimes-songwriter Toby Smith. Yet this is totally un-funkadelic. The end product is kind of like an AOR Fratellis or an uncool Zutons.
Lyrically, The Hoosiers don’t fair much better. I was expecting to find some nuggets of wisdom contained within – some sage advice to help one navigate this seemingly unsolvable mystery of life. Considering the album’s title, surely that wasn’t too much to hope for.
A wise man once said, ‘…if you can’t say anything nice about someone, make sure they’re out of the room.’ I the spirit of that wisdom, I will think of something nice to say about the Hoosiers…okay….here it is.
While derivative, and certainly not odd, The Hoosiers to have that uncanny knack of shoving songs right inside your head and sticking them to your brain like musical superglue. There is a definite toe-tapping quality to songs like ‘Worried About Ray ’, ‘Goodbye Mr. A” and ‘Worse Case Scenario’ that makes the whole experience at least bearable.
