The Boy Bathing
A Fire to Make Preparations
(Boybathing, 2008)

The Boy Bathing is a moral tale attributed to Aesop, the Greek slave who became famous for telling moral tales. The boy bathing is, in fact, drowning, and calling out for help. A man wanders past and watches as the boy thrashes about to stay afloat. The man shakes his head sadly. “You shouldn’t have gone in so deep,” he says, with a knowing wink. “Scold me later, help me now,” replies the youth, spitting up mouthfuls of water. What happens next is not told, but the moral of the tale is advice without help is not useful. The tale is somewhat instructional in the case of the band the Boy Bathing. The quartet—songwriter, vocalist, and multi-instrumentalist David Hurwitz; Jeannie Scofield, backing vocals, bass, and keys; Dylan Allen, second guitar, vocals, keys, percussion; and Matt Bogdanow, drums, vocals, accordion, keys, percussion—often sounds like they’re struggling with oceanic emotions that threaten to overwhelm and engulf them. At other times they seem more like the man in the tale, detached and slightly amused by their own creativity.

On the positive side, the Boy Bathing has a lot to recommend. They have a unique sound marked by four strong elements. There are the shaky, quavering vocals of David Hurwitz, who gets a lot of Conor Oberst comparisons but who sounds altogether more fragile, with an angry despairing edge; the backing vocals of Jeannie Scofield, who sings in harmony, or unison, or floats free to deliver words behind and before the beat, adding even more tension and confusion to songs already heavy with both; Hurwitz’s idiosyncratic guitar style; and the inventive horn charts (if they are indeed written parts, sounding as they do like freeform collisions of sound rather than thought-out melodic accents).

The official bio says they’re an indie rock/emo/folk band from New York City, which is true as far as it goes, although there’s an element of country and freeform chaos in the mix that sets them apart from most folk rockers. On their MySpace page, they coin the term cuddlecore to describe themselves, although curdlecore might be closer to the truth. In his lyrics, Hurwitz is grappling with the specter of modern love in all its multifaceted disguises, with a sensibility that’s full of unrequited yearning, irritation, and bitter resignation. The tunes, like folksongs of old, often lack choruses and cruise along on a torrent of images, which Hurwitz spews furiously, piling similes and metaphors so high that they ultimately come avalanching down, leaving you to search through the rubble and find your own meaning in his message.

“The Beaches Meet the Sea” opens the album with a simple, intriguing guitar figure full of harmonic overtones. Hurwitz sounds mournful as he sings of a love that has left him crushed and diminished. Scofield’s vocals add a second voice that amplifies the confusion of the lyrics. The song slowly builds in volume without ever resolving itself; it’s all tension and no release, just like the situation Hurwitz is singing about. This is the template for many of the songs on the album: Pleasant, linear melodies, plenty of intricate wordplay, and interesting musical touches that don’t really go anywhere. The lyrics often don’t scan, which is no crime when it’s done with panache, but often it just sounds like careless songwriting. Now and again an actual chorus surfaces, as in “The Apple Is Sliced”, a despondent song about drowning one’s sorrows that sounds like emo country and sums up everything that’s wrong and right about drinking in its lyric: “One shot of happy, one shot of sad, one helps you remember and one makes you forget.”

We all have friends who are in the habit of pouring out the minutiae of their lives at great length every time they open their mouths. Because we like them, or maybe even love them, we nod our heads politely and make the appropriate sympathetic noises, but really our minds are wandering. We’re waiting for them to shut up so we can order dinner or get on with the rest of the evening. There’s nothing really bad about A Fire to Make Preparations, but it just doesn’t hold your interest. Tighter song structures and a few solid melodies would help give the songs the impact this band obviously wants to make.

Listen: Various Tracks [at myspace.com]

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