Chris Walla - FieldManual

Mon 11th Feb, 2008 in Music Reviews

Chris Walla’s solo release Field Manual begins with the inspired track, Two-Fifty. His soft reverby vocals spill out of your speakers unaccompanied and you start to get excited.

All hail an imminent collapse/You can fumble for your maps/But we’re exhausted by the facts

The recognisable Chris Walla production style is present with the warm vocal sheen adding an epic quality to simple pop songs as is the much blogged about – œpolitical’ edge to the album, with the resigned lyrics recalling a time when the U.S government was determined to declare war despite its dodgy intelligence. And then the track ends and nothing happens.

Or more to the point Death Cab for Cutie happens, which is the album’s only weakness, but it’s such a severe one that it completely stunts Field Manual’s potential. Chris Walla is so involved with Death Cab for Cutie as a producer and a guitarist that he can’t divorce himself from the band at all in his solo work. The tracks following Two-Fifty lose that sense of something more, which Walla desperately needed for this album to stand out amongst his previous work. All of the songs could seamlessly be placed on a Death Cab for Cutie album, which is disappointing considering this was a chance for Chris Walla to make a genuine statement as an individual artist.

Leading up to the album he said, – œI worked so hard with this record to make sure that all the words that were coming out of my mouth were words I actually connected to,’ and lyrically and vocally there is a definite difference between Walla and Ben Gibbard (Death Cab for Cutie vocalist), with Chris Walla managing to turn down the earnestness which can sometimes mar Gibbard’s Death Cab tracks. However the offshoot of this is that the tracks veer to the other extreme, with the majority of the tracks so easygoing that the album tends to meander, making it easy to lose sense of the strong political content Walla has worked so hard to include. Apart from Two-Fifty, only Sing Again and Geometry and C are particularly strong with both songs sung with enough verve to convince you to push through to the end of the CD.

While Chris Walla’s value as a collaborator, musician and producer is undiminished, after hearing the album I’m left with a desperate need to ask him – œwhy bother?’. The songs are solid without being memorable and the lyrical content is obscured by the weak delivery of them. As a result Field Manual can only be considered as a lost opportunity, falling victim to Chris Walla’s unwillingness to step away musically from his prolific output with Death Cab for Cutie.