William F. Gibbs - My Fellow Sophisticates

Is this a joke? Is this nostalgia? Is this irony? Ironic nostalgia? Can we be nostalgic for a time we’ve only seen in our great-grandparents’ photo albums?

Track 1 - Darling, You Were Beautiful Once

Track 7 - Operate

William F. Gibbs’ My Fellow Sophisticates starts off with a honky tonk piano, 20’s dumpa-dumpa heartbeat sounding big band drums, one of those sliding spinning top type noisemakers, and Gibbs’ bass-strong voice. He sings well – theatrically - frequently dragging and contorting his voice to match the weight of his lyrics. The background music continues tooting on, switching between musical ages as the song continues – Copa Cabana type brushes on drum and cymbals, wolf-wailing saxophones, and Gibbs’ omnipresent voice (enjoying the full benefit of 21^st century recording enhancements). “Darling, You Were Beautiful Once” is a good introduction to the rest of his album – a tour of Gibbs’ favorite musical standards from the last century, all weirdly (occasionally beautifully) pieced together.

A note on this next track: you’re going to want to turn it off the first time you hear it. The second time too. Maybe the third time as well – it really depends on how long you’ve drinking, and how long it’s been since your last significant other left you. Sober, the song becomes somewhat bearable by listen 6 or 7. Of course, if you’re categorically opposed to songs with titles like “Come Back to Me (for my love),” then you’ll never like this second track. You probably won’t like the third track, “Oh Pollyanna,” either. (though you could probably tolerate it for a listen or two)

“Here Comes Your Steamboat Brother! Here Comes Your Freightline Sister!” brings us back into the goof-ball nostalgia that made “Darling, You Were Beautiful Once” so much fun. Johnny Cash steam train rhythms? Great Depression-era story telling? A female vocalist, singing slightly out of step with Gibbs? Shit, he even finds room for a 3-4 person chorus to sing scat! “Here Comes Your Steamboat Brother! Here Comes Your Freightline Sister!” is a nice payoff for the listeners who’ve been forcing themselves to stomach the singer/songwriter treacle of tracks 2 through 4.

My Fellow Sophisticates gets sort of weird(er) from this point on. After a Darla Farmer-ish 6th track, Gibbs` returns to the tracks 2 through 4 blues. You can almost hear him: “Oops, almost forgot that I’m a serious artist! With a lot of pain! Buckets of it!” Do yourself a favor and add tracks 7 and 8 to the skip list. But take a second to give number 9, “Streetfighter” a listen before ditching the album – the song’s an homage to those badass disco hand clapping songs you usually listen to alone in your car, or right after a shower, when you’re doing your impression of Tom Cruise’s Risky Business dancing scene.

So the album’s sort of a conundrum. It’s got gobs of pre- and mid-Depression era musical nods, but it’s (arguably) just as influenced by the last 5-10 years of indie music. And you can’t easily categorize it by “feeling” either, even if half the album’s tracks are murky “my girlfriend left me and now I’m gonna write a song” pieces – the other tracks easily make up for those deadly boring ones in sheer musical “big-ness;” a brilliant quality I envision as Gibbs saying, “my girlfriend left me and now I’m gonna go tell pirate stories to train-hobos!”