From Tommy Lee's rotating, airborne cage to John Bonham's gong, rock drummers have made crowd-pleasing gimmicks a time-honored tradition. Freelance Whales' Jacob Hyman' addition to this legacy is... incorporating a watering can into his kit. I wouldn't bring this up if everyone else didn't-- it's the most oft-repeated factoid regarding Freelance Whales in all of their pre-release hype. But I'll be damned if I could pinpoint that watering can on record. It's basically a cutesy affectation without actual purpose, which isn't a bad metaphor for the band itself.
Freelance Whales are gaining attention for good reason. Besides being on Frenchkiss, a label with a great recent track record of locating bands with quality plus commercial appeal (Passion Pit, the Antlers, Dodos, Local Natives), FW sound on the surface a lot like 00s Indie Hall of Famers Arcade Fire, Ben Gibbard, and Sufjan Stevens. Freelance Whales have plenty of band-camp orchestrations, complete-sentence lyrics, and banjo; but their predecessors' work was so resonant because it felt birthed out of necessity and populated with real people and relatable emotion. Here, everything is based in stunted adolescence and rote ideas-- you almost wonder if they think storks bring babies to this world.
The cloying overload starts with "Hannah", wherein frontman Judah Dadone empties a vault of Manic Pixie Dream Girl clichés-- martinis, balconies, chance encounters on spiral stairs. He also unveils an early contender for the most eye-gouging lyrical run of 2010: "Every now and again she offers me a lemon Now & Later/ Please don't play the matchmaker/ Please don't be a player hater/ If you dig her recent work/ You should go congratulate her." They should've just been up front and titled this song "Zooey".
Most of Weathervanes is serviceable modern rock, so it will find an appreciative audience despite its egregious derivativeness and a lyricist who seems like he'd use the word "inebriated" to talk about how drunk he got last night. "Kilojoules" fascinates itself with bodily function in a manner similar to Death Cab's "Tiny Vessels" or "We Looked Like Giants", but while Gibbard's lyrics were awkward in a vitally hormonal way, Dadone's are awkward merely as a result of bad poetry: "You liken me to a vampire/ My left hand was wearing fake plastic teeth all winter." "Ghosting" doesn't trust the understated delicacy of its acoustic motif enough to convey beauty, so it dumped an entire Christmas' worth of bells and choirs over stilted nostalgia.
Freelance Whales are a far cry from the unforgivable Owl City, but it's kind of amazing this Nick & Norah-core is both surviving and thriving. At this rate Death Cab are staking out Pearl Jam status in the 2010s, i.e., a band that gave many astute listeners an entry to more outré sounds but ultimately became reviled for the shitty music they, through no fault of their own, inspired. Now that the Etsy set's poet laureate has married its prom queen, you wonder if guys like Freelance Whales are trying to draw a wedge between Gibbard and Deschanel by somehow sullying both of their work. As a document of high-concept revenge, Weathervanes is actually kind of fascinating. Alas, that's likely not to be the case, and as just plain music it's not very fascinating at all.
