Home » Music » Indie Music » This Beautiful Mess: Falling On Deaf Ears

This Beautiful Mess: Falling On Deaf Ears

© **

Sometimes it’s not what you say but how you say it. We’ll get to the music in a second, but for those dissenters out there, I refer you to David Lynch’s latest offering, Mulholland Drive, in which a laughable, cliché-ridden scene from a script-within-the-script is later replayed, doused with sexual tension and set ablaze by Naomi Watts.

And so it goes with Holland’s This Beautiful Mess. Vocalist Arjen Van Wijk could probably sing you the phone book and make it sound profound. That’s not to say that the lyrics are terrible—they’re not—but after the songs have burrowed into your subconscious—and they will—you’ll be surprised to realize how relatively simple the lyrics are compared to the emotion that they carry.

Falling on Deaf Ears plays out like an album made by a more cinematic and broodingly complex incarnation of Travis. Some listeners will be probably be reminded of the ever-invoked Thom Yorke when Van Wijk hits the high notes (he is capable of impressive vocal gymnastics). But, overall, the band has a sound that is very much their own while not straying too far from a common ground of pop savvy.

“Black Is The New Red” is a gem of an opener, setting the tone for the entire album. Each listen brings a different layer and band member to the forefront—Lydia Wever’s swirling keyboard and string machine, Axel Kabboord’s controlled-to-crashing percussion, Abne Herrebout’s patient bass backbone, and Joop Flamman’s pop-sensible guitar. What will probably take center stage on the first listen, of course, is Van Wijk’s soaring vocals. Within the span of a couple minutes, he transforms from charmingly pleading (“I want you inside / So why don’t you come and find me / I’ll be waiting right here”) to hopelessly pissed (screaming “It’s out of my hands again” over and over at song’s end). He looks better in the former Jeff Buckley skin than the latter Kurt Cobain skin, but it’s entertaining to see them both crammed into a song.

Van Wijk is at his vulnerable best in the beautiful “Soundtrack of My Life.” If it wasn’t for the unfortunate computer voice that slowly sings along with Van Wijk on the chorus (think Neil Young circa “Transformer Man”), it’d be damned near perfect with its calm build to its towering climax.

The other nine songs don’t quite live up to the lofty standards set by the album’s best two tracks, which are alone worth the price of admission. In many ways to the band’s credit, Falling on Deaf Ears functions much better as a beginning-to-end album than individual songs you toss on the stereo.

The copyright of the article This Beautiful Mess: Falling On Deaf Ears in Indie Music is owned by **. Permission to republish This Beautiful Mess: Falling On Deaf Ears in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.