The North Sea — Exquisite Idols
The North Sea is the musical voice of Brad Rose, a busy guy who runs the Digitalis label, as well as the Foxglove CD-R label, and the Foxy Digitalis webzine. It certainly can't be argued that Mr. Rose isn't dedicated to underground music. This is his first "official" release, following a boatload of limited run CD-R's on various labels.
Exquisite Idols fits pretty squarely into the new American folk scene. Which is to say, it's folk music most of the time, with ramshackle drone over top. The first track, Eternal Birds starts off with a wavery one note organ drone, which is augmented by what sounds like plucked piano strings, and some scraping of things. As the title indicates, birdsong enters the picture partway through, rather obtrusively. The birdsong continues on the next track, Guiwenneth of the Green Grass, still high up in the mix. The folk element first emerges here, in the form of acoustic guitar, echoey, far away vocals and analog keys. The third track, We Conquered the Golden Age, is a long, repetitive folk drone, which is noisy in it's own quiet way. It features discordant open guitar chords and percussion which sounds inspired by the primal pounding of Mo' Tucker. Most of the rest of the album's eight tracks consist of more slightly left of center folk tunes, with the exception of Cover Me with Knives, a noisy organ drone with xylophone accents.
It's certain that a fair bit of creativity went into the arrangement of these tunes. The problem is that although some of the sounds and textures are nice, the songs don't really draw you in. Brad Rose's vocal delivery is also pitchy, which is a problem when the vocals are featured up front in the mix, on the more traditional folk tracks. Exquisite Idols is certainly not a disaster. But in this era of new folk (or whatever the fuck you want to call it..."New Weird" is pretty vague and pointless to me), where an ocean of CD-R's, records and tapes are issued on a monthly basis, this album merely treads water somewhere in the middle.