I fully expected to find, when I checked the credits for the two albums, that there'd been drastic personnel changes between them, but the cast is exactly the same. I've gone back and forth between them a few times, trying to isolate a quality or two that explains my divergent reactions, but so far I haven't come up with anything beyond the simple observation that the first album mostly bores me and the second one refuses to let me go for even a measure. I'm going to assume, because giving up and calling it subjective is frustrating, that the band just got better. It was only when I started listening to singer John Faye's lyrics, though, that L really began to sink its teeth into me. In fact, when I get out the booklet for Whirligig and read through it, I discover that I underestimated even the first album's songs, and almost all the bits that seemed merely clever in isolation seem genuinely smart to me in context.
L is, if anything, even more poignant.
Mining a low self-opinion for subject matter is currently a frighteningly popular tactic, with Ben Folds perhaps the most accomplished practitioner, but I get the feeling that Faye, unlike Folds, is learning something from the introspection. But the Caulfields are somber centrists compared to the Negro Problem, whose florid, chaotic debut album, Post Minstrel Syndrome , is one of the most irrepressibly erratic records I've heard in a long time. Musically, though, skin color is wildly irrelevant. Post Minstrel Syndrome is a reeling, hallucinatory experience, something like Kool-Aid spiked with Essence of Superball. On my tolerant days, though, this seems like as good a way to make an album as any.