Sometimes diversity is a bad thing. And in Our Final Days as Archipelago, the first full-length album from Waterloo, Ontario’s the Monster Show, is a great example of diversity’s follies.
It’s difficult to slot the Monster Show into a genre. That’s because the band attempts to cram in songs of every single genre, resulting in a disjointed hodge-podge of musical meandering. After starting off with the folksy “Winnipeg and Fargo,” the album dabbles in blues, country and bluegrass before taking a dive into confusion with “Beer Caps, Friday,” a strange concoction that begins as synth-rock, features horn interludes and then abandons the approach three-quarters of the way through.
The single biggest problem with And in Our Final Days as Archipelago is the mixing. The instrumentals on the album are varied and competent, at times insanely catchy, but all-but-completely drown out the lyrics. As a result, most of the songs are difficult to enjoy. However, given the high-school-poetry quality of the audible lyrics on the ballad “Glory,” it might be a good thing listeners can’t hear the words.
The first effort for the Monster Show is a mixed bag. They emerge as yet another player on the Ontario musical board, but this album reveals them for the time being as a band that does a lot of things competently, but nothing especially well.