{"id":40894,"date":"2008-05-16T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2008-05-16T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/reviews\/time-travel-made-easy\/"},"modified":"2008-05-16T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2008-05-16T00:00:00","slug":"time-travel-made-easy","status":"publish","type":"review","link":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/reviews\/time-travel-made-easy\/","title":{"rendered":"Time Travel Made Easy"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve always had a soft spot for concept albums.\u00a0 Maybe it\u2019s the storyteller — or former drama student — in me, but I’ve always thought there was something endearingly audacious about trying to capture an audience with an extended narrative consisting entirely of, well, pop songs.<\/p>\n

Whatever it is, it definitely helps me to appreciate the new disc from New Jersey<\/st1:place><\/st1:state> indie-rockers Spiraling, who fearlessly cross-pollinated Alan Parsons, H.G. Wells, Groundhog Day<\/i> and the Cars to come up with Time Travel Made Easy<\/i>.\u00a0 Over the course of 13 tracks broken into two roughly equal parts, TTME<\/i> tells the story — hope I\u2019ve got this about right — of a hopelessly hung up science geek who tries to impress his crush by inventing a time machine, gets rejected anyway, and then travels back in time repeatedly trying to make their relationship come out the way he thinks it should.<\/p>\n

Time Travel Made Easy<\/i> is the brainchild of Spiraling lead vocalist\/keyboardist Tom Brislin, who also writes all the songs and produces.\u00a0 Multitalented as he is, Brislin proves himself to be first and foremost a music fan, melding the manic melodic genius of Ben Folds with the tortured geek romance of Fountains Of Wayne while channeling classic rock acts ranging from Queen — whose theatrical flair and total commitment to a song he clearly idolizes — to expansive proggers like Parsons and ELP.\u00a0 Making these leaps of musical imagination possible are bandmates Marty O\u2019Kane (guitar), Paul Wells (drums) and Bob Hart (bass), whose work is punchy, versatile and perfectly in sync with Brislin\u2019s full-spectrum vision. <\/p>\n

One of the strongest aspects of the album, though, is that these songs stand on their own quite well, outside of the threads of the larger story, especially numbers like \u201cThe Future,\u201d which rings with thrashy Coldplay-meets-Green Day tunefulness, and \u201cVictory Kiss,\u201d which comes off like a makeout session between the Cars and Duran Duran, perhaps with Thomas Dolby on synths.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

Other highlights include the throbbing build and Brian Wilson-ish layered vocal arrangement of \u201cAll Kinds Of Love,\u201d O\u2019Kane\u2019s stellar guitar work in the middle section of \u201cEnemy,\u201d the brilliantly over-the-top arrangement of \u201cChoices,\u201d the airy Brit-rock stylings of \u201cAre You Here\u201d and the ADHD symphonic rock of \u201cBorrowed Time.\u201d\u00a0 Props are of course also due for the fact that \u201cThe Concept Of The Quantum-Mechanical Bodymind Has Sparked A Great Idea\u201d features a chorus that goes: \u201cI do what I want \/ Do what I want \/ Do what I want \/ Even if your fancy textbook says that I can\u2019t.\u201d\u00a0 Snark on, gentlemen\u2026<\/p>\n

The obvious business plan for a New York-area indie group like Spiraling would be to make an album full of singles and try to get on the radio.\u00a0 And while \u201cVictory Kiss\u201d and a couple of others here surely deserve airplay, Time Travel Made Easy<\/i> is a fairly aggressively uncommercial album, full of smart, challenging music and ideas that force the listener to adjust and think and appreciate the larger vision of the artist.\u00a0 In other words, it\u2019s pretty kickass.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":29336,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"artist":[7081],"rating":[5613],"class_list":["post-40894","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-spiraling","rating-rating-a-minus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/40894","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40894"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/40894\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29336"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40894"},{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=40894"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=40894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}