It is sometimes difficult to qualitatively describe one’s experience in listening to music. I’m reminded of a cereal commercial where adults ask a group of children why they like Apple Jacks when it doesn’t taste like apple, and the kids kind of shrug and say something like “we just do.” I’ve been listening to this Factors of Four’s Whoa!!! over the past several weeks, essentially since they gave me the CD in January, and while I can say definitively that I like it, a lot even, until now I haven’t been able to defend my position other than to say, “I just do.”
I met Factors of Four when my band played with them in a basement, amorously referred to the Crack House, in Honey Brook, PA. They started playing a blend of up-tempo power-pop garage rock and everyone in the room started to dance. Two songs in I found myself crowd surfing, after my band mates hoisted me up, and much to my surprise everyone held me up and I made my way across the room. This is when I became really impressed with Factors of Four because while I’d like to consider myself a basement show connoisseur, rarely does any band energize the room in that manner to where you can actually jump on people and have them not be mad.
Right. I digress. On to the review.
Whoa!!! begins triumphantly with boy/girl vocals stretching the word “whoa” into a 5-syllable melody. Bright guitars strum through the song while the lead singer, Naomi, introduces her unconventionally beautiful voice, slightly off of kilter, resembling a young Caithlin De Marrais of Rainer Maria mixed with some deeper tones of Fionna Apple. The dual vocals return at the end of the song with the suggestion, “Go ahead boy (girl), go ahead get down,” and then a chorus of voices chime in with a few more ‘whoa’s’ (I have no idea how to effectively use quotations marks here.)
The album has a garage rock feel without being classifiably lo-fi. You can tell the recording was done in a basement, actually the Crack House basement by Pirouette’s Scotty Leitch, but rather than hurt the recording it helps accentuate the full sound. If you’re listening to it for the first time it possesses all the rawness of a well recorded live show with my only critique being that the guitars are mixed a little loud at points which can overshadow the vocals.
Whoa!!! has six tracks, with all of them being impressive and a few being exceptional. Track 3, “Happy Hour”, shines both musically and vocally, Tim’s guitar picks through the intro while the lyrics contemplate life’s little obstacles and obscurities, “Then on a slippery road it is easy to fall and the road is so big and the snow so tall.”
The song, “12th Street” is another exemplary track, where Naomi harps, “I am waiting for a change of skin” and observes that “moving on is such a chore,” while the guitars palm mute through the verses and strum lazily through the chorus. “12th Street” as well as most of these tracks on Whoa!!! are linear in their composition but catchy as hell. If FoF aren’t exactly groundbreaking they’ve certainly refined a sound that is both inviting and memorable.
Ultimately, Whoa!!! is an impressive debut that introduces Factors of Four as a band fully capable of writing clever garage-tinged pop songs. These songs present a double consciousness in FoF’s desire to play upbeat and catchy songs and their desire to occasionally rock the fuck out. Listen to this record if you can appreciate the pop sensibility of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs but want the garage aesthetic of You’re Living All Over Me era Dinosaur Jr.
Hopefully, I’ll go back to one review every week, February was a weak month in terms of content.
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