Sibera

Damage (Necessary)
by Jeff Fritz

This collection is made up largely of spacy liquid pop with enough rough edges and hooks for your ear to get a toehold, textured and ambient but with enough complexity of arrangement to keep your attention, relatively mellow but slightly sinister. Siberia is the combined effort of composer/guitarist John West, lyricist Randy Farmer, and a handful of musical partners in crime assisting on the other instruments including some fine blues harp licks on the tune “She Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.”

The lead track from Damage is called “Cowboy Trip,” the operative word there being “trip,” and it’s representative of the tone of most of the album. The song glides off on some Floydian weirdness, complete with million-mile-away slide guitar notes juxtaposed against a rhythm change and a Beatles-esque chorus. It’s clear from some of the other tracks that Farmer can find a melody pretty well, but on this song, like most of the others, she prefers to roll her lyrics out only half-sung and chanted, a female Lou Reed kind of style which serves to make the words understandable, and that’s good since they’re worth hearing. If the sound of her voice is melodically monotonous at times, at least it’s a good story.

The one thing I could live without on this disc is the cover of that faux-hip cartoon classic “Sugar Sugar.” Yeah, I watched the Archies when I was small. We all did. It wasn’t very funny. It was just what happened to be on. Same with Scooby fucking Doo and those Partridge geeks. It was all a bad joke in the first place. Why perpetuate it? But with that off my chest, I can’t find much else to criticize here. Damage should be done.