“disappointment_inc”
Disappointment Incorporated
F=0
Time Bomb
Disappointment Incorporated are certainly not a disappointment to rock off. There’s Brian Burns (vocal), Mark Christian (guitar, keyboard, percussion, banjo, backing vocals), Warren Huart (guitar, keyboard, bass, backing vocals), Doug Van Dyck (bass, keyboard, guitar, backing vocals), Roel Kuiper (drums, percussion, backing vocal). They are a fully integrated band knowing fully well what type of precision they want to arrive at to transpose the listener to another level of rapture.
“Forget,” the first track, certainly aims at the futility of trying to aspire to that perfect love affair that only adolescents and teen-agers are able to accomplish. I particularly like the line, “Like Hollywood Stars in smashed up cars.” In “Candy (Let Me In),” a lover is trying to go back to the women that used to always be there. “Chinese” is politically bent. It surmises and surprises us that the Chinese are really the master race. How quaint that they (the Chinese) convinced America to make war on the upstart Japanese just so that these billion or so people allowed our poor G.I.’s to fight their war and get butchered at their expense and like the western Europeans, there is very little appreciation for it! America, those curious interlopers who that they were vanquishing the yellow and white hordes with their unsuspecting black, white and red hordes. This had better stop. We must kill the will to kill.
“Hurts To Laugh” continues along the romantic venue of the first two tracks. The lines “Angry tears ungranted wishes. Promises dark as crimson kisses” really get to me. In “Gone To Heaven,” the world of rapture leads unrequitedly to the world of hell in an instant proving the simultaneity of cause and effect. In “Feelings Mean Nothing,” the bridge seems to offer the best lyrics, “How have we become so superstitious? Mystified by what we perceive. As crass indifference. Sanity, vanity, goodness or sin. Human folly is merely here to entertain. Now that I have been loved I can laugh, laugh at the damage.”
“Anna” is a beautiful song, with the shuddering lyrics, “Anna, realize I have been the same age all my life.” “Vanishing” is basically a plea for isolation in a universe so full of activity. “Almost Again (Our Summer Song)” is a coquettish ballad that infers nothing but the final outcome of a man’s carnal desire for a woman and a woman’s return.
“American” is another politically skewed melody parenthetically admitting that although most of us in this country have it better than in other countries we still have a long way to go. “Don’t Think The Sun”’s lyrics are illegible (and I have 15/20 vision), but it has a driving beat and I suppose my hearing cannot pick up any significant or coherent words.
Finally, “Bleeding Boy”’s lyrics are even more illegible than “Don’t Think The Sun”’s, if that were possible. Were these two songs stuck on as an afterthought, or is it poor packaging from Time Bomb Recordings? Does this force the casual listener to take them more seriously than otherwise?
Time Bomb Recordings, 225 Lafayette Street #1006, New York, NY 10012; http://www.timebombrecordings.com
