opinions were like kittens i was giving them away. -modest mouse
there's nothing as something as one. -e. e. cummings
The Double music review
Discuss The Double and all of your favorite musicians in our music forums.
Have you heard this album? Give us your rating above, 5 being best.
The Double Loose In the Air
Matador
It will always come down to the songwriting. Try what you might with instrumentation and production, if you’ve written a good song, you’ve got a good song – and you haven’t, you haven’t.
Track listing:
01 Up All Night
02 Idiocy
03 Icy
04 On Our Way
05 Ripe Fruit
06 Hot Air
07 What Sound It Makes the Thunder
08 In the Fog
09 Dance
10 Busty Beasty
Take, for instance, the Double. These Brooklyn boys, best known as openers for Interpol and Blonde Redhead, sell themselves as descendents of the Velvet Underground and the Doors, and when it comes to production and instrumentation, they do their best to back it up. Each song on Loose In the Air is buried under a layer of wintry reverb and echoing feedback, punctuated by pumping organs and blasts of crunchy distortion. They never approach the heights reached by John Cale’s tortured viola or Ray Manzarek’s molten Vox Continental, but those are some lofty aspirations. At the very least, you can see that the Double are moving in the right direction; they are trying something dark, weird and experimental.
Strip away all these trimmings, however, and there’s not much here that would remind you of those greats. In fact, they come off more like Coldplay’s angry American cousins than anything else. The majority of the actual songwriting on Loose In the Air is of the languid-mainstream-pop-ballad variety. At its worst, the songwriting falls apart completely. The final two tracks, “Dance” (it won’t make you want to) and “Busty Beasty” (terrible, terrible title), are disjointed aural messes.
Now, the exceptions to all of this are the first three songs. “VP All Night”, “Idiocy” and “Icy” each work well because underneath all of the effects are three tight catchy tunes. They provide a solid base from which to experiment. Sadly, the Double can’t keep it up. By the time the listener finds themselves a dozen minutes or so into the album, all of the best moments are already behind them. Cut down to those three tracks, the Double might have one of the better EP’s of 2005. As the third full-length album by a band looking to rise to the next level, however, it doesn’t make the grade.
