Often, there’s just not enough time in the day to get to all the good music sent to us at Live Eye Tv. That means wading through our emails can be a bit bittersweet as some track, video, or album that deserves to be listened to or watched is gonna slip through the cracks. On this busy Monday, I had other write-ups promised and was hoping it might be a slow news day so that I could attend to the backlog. Doing my best to ignore the onslaught of incoming requests, though, my plans were quickly derailed today when I found the new Funny Face House LP Tone Deaf had arrived via Twitter.
We first told you about the group last August when we stumbled on their debut 6-track effort IS REAL. Self-recorded to a 4-track in the living room of a house shared by band members Adam Szyndrowski and Mallery Petty, the guitarist and bassist where joined on the album by drummer Daniel Cohn. Unabashedly raw and baked up in a crust of dust and noise just to throw you off the scent, underneath it all IS REAL was an indie pop album that bellied the group’s ability for writing hook laden shout-alongs. Reminiscent of forgotten jewels like Silver Jews The Arizona Record or Pavement‘s Westing (By Musket And Sextant), IS REAL’s shaggy exterior barely disguised the band’s talent for writing songs full of quirky charm.
Tone Deaf finds Funny Face House continuing their self-recording ways and the Tascam 488 is the perfect device for capturing this do-it-yourself aesthetic. Laid down to tape in San Jose, CA, the project is still helmed by Szyndrowski and Petty, but the new effort finds the pair joined by Sean Colvin on drums and Mando Moreno on keyboards. Tone Deaf revisits previous tracks like “Soup,” “Green Tercel,” “Orca,” “Lazy Susan,” and “California,” but it finds them cleaned up and more fully realized.
While many of those tracks already stood out on the merits of their addictive melody lines and playful delivery, with the addition of keyboards, expanded vocal elements and a cleaner production style, songs such as “Soup,” “Green Tercel” and “Lazy Susan” are less like hastily scrawled out sketches. Sure, the previous iterations of those tracks possessed a gritty immediacy, and while that’s not lost here, the newly recorded versions are like that cute but frowsy crush that cleans up nicely on a second date.
If Tone Deaf eschews the band’s punkish disdain for high fidelity, it comes in favor of a heavier, bass-driven approach. New cuts like “Kidney Thief” and “Lizard,” or the revisit of the IS REAL beater “Green Tercel,” still shine on the merits of a devil-may-care attitude, but their more developed sound means they pack a heftier wallop. Additionally, Tone Deaf‘s expanded sonic palette allows for greater emotional nuance and that really comes thru on an album standout like “Magnolia.” Built around dusky low-end and the interplay between rollicking keys and guitar, this multi-tiered track features Szyndrowski’s impassioned delivery as well as the group’s playful vocal harmonies. Seeming to reflect back on the happier days of a maturing relationship, the song is emblematic of the band’s continued development as songwriters and it points towards their brightening future.
