Vanessa Lowe Eep

Vanessa Lowe typifies the Bay Area of California: she has a doctorate in clinical psychology, she’s trying to be edgy somewhere between urban hipster and new age, and she seldom rhymes. She is, in short, the female version of the scruffy guy that plays ‘kinda folk-ish’ songs at open mic night. She describes her latest album, rather generously, as ‘acoustic experi-pop’. One of these words is off the mark, for there’s no experimentation in Eep. In reality, the single greatest deficiency of Lowe’s music is the complete lack of anything approaching originality.

 

Eep follows a strict template of acoustic guitar folk-rock in which the sound of fingers sliding up and down the metal strings is very prominent. Her vocals and guitar are backed up by drums, bass, and a selection of what she apparently considers novelty instruments but aren’t really that quaint: handclaps, a supremely grating melodica, some hand drums or a recorder. Lowe is musically competent enough; it’s not to say that she’s posturing or incompetent. But the album is devoid of any artistic expression and not a single track even comes close to emotional significance. Lowe even tries her hand at a feeble Imogen Heap circa i Megaphone imitation on the album closer, Waterfall, but with none of Heap’s anger, prowess or variation: laid back and monotonous.

 

The lyrics, perhaps, best reveal the album’s shortcomings. The album opens with lines that try for insightful social criticism but just retread the same path as every other street-corner singer-songwriter. "It’s time to go back down to the factory / and churn all the shit out the smokestacks / ‘til there’s only one great big cloud of misery / hovering over us and blocking the sun", Lowe sings on Up Up Above. When not attempting witty sociopolitical repartee, Lowe hands out chapbooks of bad high school poetry: "Write me down on a piece of cloth, hold me up and let me slip away" (Listen Closely), or "I want to go outside where the cold wind howls and howl along with it" (Vertigo). Worst of all, though, is when Lowe, emulating great lyricists, throws up an attempt at obtuseness and symbolism that falls far short (somewhere, for the record, between Engrish and bad alliteration)—"When I creep out I’m not trying to creep you out", from Bug, or her musings on the album itself: "mole-songs digging little holes in the backyard".

 

The word ‘template’ sums up just about all of Eep: it is sunny, vacuous, and completely unoriginal. Predictability seeps out of every pore and the album lacks any emotional depth. The lyrics are either nonsensical or hackneyed trite, and even the sequencing plays like a Microsoft Word ‘track list’ template, down to the timeworn instrumental track in the middle. I wouldn’t say I hate this album: it’s just insipid and irritating. There is nothing new, nothing original to make it worthwhile, and unoriginality is the one cardinal sin of music that cannot be forgiven.