It was Sunday morning at South By Southwest in Austin. I was eating breakfast with my kid sister when Peter Jesperson stopped by our table to rave about Marah’s gig the night before. For years the former manager of the Replacements (now a New West Records VP) had been among the band’s most vocal boosters, but now my sister — a college sophomore who’d seen the same gig — subtly suggested to Jesperson that he was full of beans. Marah, she inveighed, was drowning its considerable talents in a puddle of rock-god bombast.
I didn’t want to believe her. I liked Marah’s albums, loved the word-drunk tongue tumblings of soul poet Dave Bielanko. And last year I’d been intrigued to hear that the boys had sold their possessions, disowned their oft-annoying South Philly shtick, and moved to Wales to shack up in the studio with the noted guitar priapist Owen Morris, producer of the best Oasis discs. Morris seemed sure to remedy the sometimes skimpy sound that I’d felt foiled Kids In Philly.
Yet Float Away With The Friday Night Gods doesn’t realize its potential. Sure, it rocks: Cuts such as “Leaving”, “Shame”, and “For All We Know We’re Dreaming” are flush with surging endorphin guitars and cascading drums. And the spacey soul of “Crying On An Airplane” is a fittingly woozy counterpoint to the blissed-out “People Of The Underground” — which, with its inescapable sing-song chant bopping atop a neck-snapping beat, could be a smash.
But the lyrics are mostly mush, and cluttered arrangements stifle several songs. Odd trappings — a choir on “For All We Know”, Bruce Springsteen’s voice and guitar in the background of “Float Away” — are pointless and indulgent.
Worst of all: For a record that is Marah’s admitted attempt at jukebox ubiquity, there’s nothing half as catchy as the Kids In Philly track “Point Breeze”. The sister, it seems, was right.
