Canon in Miniature #193

Fleet Foxes Sun Giant

2008; Sub Pop

The hardest task you can hand to a reviewer – or in this case that a reviewer can hand to himself – is to ask them to review a boring album. The extremes of quality lend themselves readily to discussion and critique, flawed albums even more so since dissecting things that go wrong makes for, I think, better writing than simple gushing or pure vitriol. As long as there is something that ignites any tiny sliver of passion within the reviewer, good or bad or conflicted, there is a starting point for discussion. But when the album doesn’t ignite anything within you…well that’s when you ramble as I have for the past hundred words about what makes for an easy album to review.

Essentially, the bottom line is that Sun Giant Is a boring, boring listen. Even more frustratingly, it doesn’t even have the decency to be exceptionally boring. It simply is. There isn’t any reason to discuss it beyond my misguided self-challenge to rate and review the top 200 EPs on RYM. It’s that rare album that does nothing for 20 minutes, at no point even daring you to form an opinion of it. There is not good bad here, this is simply a blank sheet of paper. That paper could have any number of things penned upon it that could fall on either side of the quality divide, yet not even a token gesture is made in that direction. I cannot hate it because it isn’t objectively bad or unlistenable or even unnecessary. I cannot like it because I literally cannot remember a single thing of note that Fleet Foxes did therein. I know that they harmonized competently, but they did it in such an anodyne way that no mark was left by it. I know that they played pleasant melodies on their instruments, but I couldn’t hum a single one of them despite having heard Sun Giant at least four times in the past 24 hours. I suppose the fact that it doesn’t leave any overwhelmingly negative feelings is a mark in its favor, but at that point I’m simply trying to find something – anything – to grasp on to in order to say anything even slightly meaningful about it, and when the album has to force me to do that what’s the point of continuing to try?

I have struggled with writing reviews in the past. You can find any number of pieces here that show me grasping until I find a concept to hang a review off of, but I think this is the most obvious and blatant among those. I mean, what can you do about an album like this but point to it and say ‘Hey, you are definitely an album! Keep doing that…’? Sun Giant could be so many things, but it manages to be none of them. Any rating handed to it is meaningless because how can you form an opinion on something that barely raises a pulse over the course of 5 songs? There are no frames of reference I can approach it from that give it any sort of quality beyond its mere being. It might well be the closest thing to the sound of the exact middle of the road, and that is something to gaze upon with the most unaffected level of awe imaginable. [5.0]