The Timbre Project: Free Souvenirs

The first half of this album is pretty damn close to perfect pop. Clocking in at a Weezer-esque 32 minutes, Free Souvenirs is a solo project from Five Dollar Milkshake frontman Jaime d’Almeida. Quickly spanning 11 tracks, the album is a mix of experimentation and tradition, comedy and drama.

“Plane Food Sucks,” composed with a guitar and a dobro, is a perfect example. A brooding guitar riff is complimented with the opening line “Plane food sucks / I’m eating trail mix.” What follows is a discourse of how even that goes wrong when the raisins are all gone, rendering the trail mix unsatisfactory as well. A joke song, right? Think again. The airline food is a distraction from the very real problem at hand: returning home. “Now I remember why I headed so far away / It’s tough when the ones that give you love are the reasons you don’t want to stay,” sings d’Almeida. The back cover states that the perfect pop song is 3 minutes long, then listens this one’s time as “-0:19”. Short and wonderful. You’ll be reaching for the repeat button.

But if you don’t get to the repeat button on time, you’re on to the next track. In this case, the next track is “Shipwrecked,” which is a plea to a man who can’t see that his love is lonely when he’s away all the time. This is a fuzzy alternative romp, followed by a pop piano ballad (the wonderfully titled “Bovine Intervention”) that, at +1:35, is the album’s longest track, reflective and sad.

“Fair E” is another charmer, a feel-good number that puts a mellotron and two piano players to good use. “Stole All You Wear” again goes in a different direction, serving as a better vehicle for d’Almeida’s vocal range and even has a wistfully twangy pedal steel that adds a strange, somehow fitting dose of country to the song.

And even though the album doesn't quite maintain the dazzlingly addictive pace of the first six songs, Free Souvenirs is unquestionably worth the price of admission. This is emotional songwriting without being angsty or emo. There is a raw honesty to both these words and this music, embedded with a wonderful sense of humor that’s apparent all over the packaging and also in songs like “Fair M,” which is an outtake of “Fair E” that features the background singing of d’Almeida’s dog and the added line “No barking!” to the lyrics. At –0:04, it’s the closest he gets to the official perfect pop song. He’ll get there one of these days...

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