Album Review: Part 1: John Shade, Your Fortune's Made by Fol Chen

It's easy to distrust bands that go out of their way to play up their elusivness on a debut, but not for the reasons they might think. Trying to find a whole lot of Fol Chen info, photographic or otherwise, on the web is a big fat waste of time. And presumably, they want you to listen to their debut and think, "man, who are Fol Chen?" Of course, that can just as easily turn into a dismissive "man, who the fuck are Fol Chen?" Especially when similar tactics worked for intentionally faceless and musically mysterious acts from (early) Sunny Day Real Estate to the Knife to the Sincerely Yours crew, and these guys play a click-push electro-acoustic pop thing whose first priority should be distancing itself from the similar likes of Anathallo and Le Loup.

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Is there any good pop music that's not melodramatic? It's hard to be sure. One of the main functions of pop music is to amplify the common, mundane events that every person experiences, to infuse them with meaning and signifigance. Keeping this in mind, it's hard to fault any pop music for melodrama. Besides, it's the execution that matters.

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