BILLY HOWERDEL’S ASHES DIVIDE FALLS SHORT OF THE MARK IN DEBUT EFFORT

Rating

April 22nd, 2008 at 3:39pm
Vince Neilstein
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With Ashes Divide, essentially a one-man solo project in band form, former A Perfect Circle collaborator Billy Howerdel has stepped out on his own. While Keep Telling Myself It’s Alright lacks the dynamic and immediacy that Tool’s Maynard James Keenan brought to the band, the album is certainly strong enough to prove Howerdel’s mettle as an able songwriter. Still, something about the ambitious artistry Howerdel seems to be getting at falls short, leaving Keep Telling Myself It’s Alright a bit on the short end of the straw and ultimately a tad disappointing.

Ashes Divide sounds more or less like you’d expect; mid-tempo rockers with lush, layered distorted and clean guitars serving as the foundation for hook-driven, heavy alternative rock. In short, think A Perfect Circle minus the Maynard plus something a touch more atmospheric.

Being a one-man band recording in your home studio has its benefits, those of experimentation and attention to detail, in which Howerdel has certainly indulged. Howerdel ambitiously experiments with a sitar (and maybe banjo?) on “Forever Can Be,” Maynard’s son Devo plays cello on one track (my guess is album closer “Sword”), and generous helpings of strings, programmed beats, synths, pianos and other bibs and bobs are sprinkled across the album. Sonically, Howerdel has paid the utmost attention to detail; when you’re not paying for studio time you can spend all the time in the world on tones and orchestration, and here that time spent has paid off. Not a single iota of sonic space is wasted, with something filling every nook and cranny of the aural spectrum at every moment. The variety of tones and textures on this record is certainly one of its assets.

From a songwriting perspective Howerdel certainly knows his way around a chorus and a verse, resulting in a bunch of concise rock songs that mostly clock in under the 4 minute mark. The only problem? Said verses and choruses tend to sound the same from one song to the next. The first five tracks on the record tend to blend from one to the next, a wash of ethereal mid-tempo blah, before “Enemies” comes along and speeds things up a notch. Even then, it feels like the same chorus as the song before it.

By album’s end I’m left craving more of the rock aspect that made A Perfect Circle so engaging (and I’m not saying that to suck on Maynard’s balls — I had high hopes for this record, knowing full well it would be different) — fitting then, that the album’s strongest and most rocking track is called “The Stone,” the record’s first single. A driving beat propels big, distorted guitars forward that when mixed with the almost industrial background sound effects creates a truly electrifying stew instead of the Coldplay-meets-Nine-Inch-Nails that most of this album resembles. The buzzsaw guitar riff and electro-punk, almost new-wavy flavor of “The Prey” stand out from the pack as well, making for easily my second favorite song on the album. The 6:29 album-closer “Sword” is another hair-raiser, free of the constraints of the pop song format and instead opting for a more ambitious, story-telling musical arc (though oddly, the last 57 seconds are just dead air). Why are this album’s best three songs its last three songs?

Ultimately I feel as if Howerdel falls a bit short of the artistry he was hoping to achieve with Keep Telling Myself It’s Alright. Though the album has some solid songs, as a whole there isn’t much that engages me and begs me to listen again and again; I was hoping Howerdel would summon something a bit more challenging and dynamic. Alas, it’s his first solo effort; hopefully he’ll learn from the experience and try again.

-VN

(two and a half out of five horns)