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World/Inferno Friendship Society love to have a good time with their friends, and they're willing to stick at least 9 performers on the stage to show it. The stage is packed with guitars, basses, singers, horns and percussion. Not surprisingly there's a lot of elements to their sound.
The Society melds bits of accessible punk, swing, classic soul, and cabaret pop to create music that's evocative of an earlier, more innocent time. That time just happens to be the New Wave heyday of the early 1980s.
Not that there's anything wrong with this. Despite what the electroclash movement of a few years ago would have you believe New Wave wasn't all pseudo-futurist glitchy gimmickry. The best New Wave artists took assorted bits of musical styles, funneled them through solid production, to create some of the best pop music of the rock era. I can tell you this: World/Inferno Friendship Society could hold a stage along side artists like Joe Jackson or Oingo Boingo.
Their new album, "Red-Eyed Soul", has no shortage of catchy, upbeat songs. Chances are that at least one song of this CD will get stuck in your head, most likely "Friend in Wien" or "Only Anarchists Are Pretty". They've learned their New Wave pop lessons well. The only thing that they should have left in the past was the very "nice" production on this recording.
"Red-Eyed Soul" sounds damn good, but a little too clean. You'd expect a band that has so many members and so much going on that there would be rough parts. Times when things seem like they're about to get away from the control of the players. Times when certain instruments ring out to, momentarily, over-power everything else. But the party energy of the band has been reigned in by the smooth production. The manic energy of their shows has been lost, the rough edges that our ears should catch on have been polished away. The whole album flows along at the same pace, the same energy. The end result is an album with great songs on it, but many of them end up running together.
This is a classic failing of soul music. Once you get a musical artist under the surgical precision of a studio a lot of character can be cut away. It's the reason that many old soul (and country) acts sound better on live recordings than studio outings. But, in the end, it's hard to find fault with World/Inferno Friendship Society for falling into the same trap as artists like James Brown and Elvis Costello.
World/Inferno Friendship Society
http://www.worldinferno.com/
http://www.myspace.com/worldinferno
Chunksaah Records
http://chunksaah.com/
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