Felix, "Oh Holy Molar"
Felix seem to approach the art of songwriting with an oblique playfulness similar to such groups as Slapp Happy or Hugo Largo, albeit with darker results. Minimal accompaniment frames Lucinda Chua singing meticulous and poetic lyrics, using everyday expressions and bizarre thoughts in a conversational style, touching on magical realism without sounding twee or trite. Oh Holy Molar is a convincing existential internal dialogue, by turns bleak, funny, honest, inspiring, sad, and wry.
This is the group's second album, recorded in an old cinema in England. Lyrics are the primary focus and these are both crystal clear and slicked with ambiguity. "The Bells," for example, mocks people who, to hear them talk, know everything, buy houses at the right price at the right time, and will deserve to be buried with churches ringing out in appreciation of them, or to echo our joy at their demise! Guitarist Chris Summerlin and drummer Neil Turpin punctuate and underscore Chua's piano and vocals, to superb effect on "Hate Song," with its lacerating lines, "This is what you get/When you take from your friends/And you make out like you didn't/And you never give anything back/No love."
"Sunday Night" utilizes two piano notes and the merest sliver of guitar to create a lovely atmosphere as Chua weaves suspicious questions with the suggestion of secrets. Most of the pieces are led by piano, but the revenge song "Rites" rests on Summerlin's languid but crunchy guitar. After a few listens I don't like all the songs, or rather would prefer to listen to just three or four at a time, treating Oh Holy Molar as if it were a journal found in the underwear drawer of a former partner, and only risking a few pages here and there.
"Oh Thee 73" is an anthem of sorts, with the line, "Friday night is the worst night to be alive/Would you help me to get out of the firing line," at its core. Onto this image Chua seems to project deft observations hinting at dread, maybe of the horror of drunken invitations, inclusion, meat market discos, and missed friends, when sometimes only dry humor and musical cynicism can buffer a sensitive individual from the whole landscape of up-close angst and collective alienation of a bad Friday night out, or in.
After a fair amount of drama, the final piece "Little Biscuit," may allude to the accepted notion, in England at least, that a cup of tea makes everything better. This cherishing of the mundane and ordinary ritual has a comforting zen truth which transcends mockery. We English would never have a biscuit (cookie) without a cup of tea, and tea is some of our existential glue in times of awkwardness, bereavement, boredom, despair, happiness, heartbreak, love, retreat, and war. Rumor has it that after this record was finished Felix discovered an old dental laboratory under the cinema space. Whatever the truth of that story, the album title and mentions of teeth worn as a necklace or falling out in a dream add to the overall air of superstition and ancient fears of everything from rejection, impotence, putting faith in the wrong person, impending sickness, and death. Things with which tea can always help.
