By Dustin Luke Nelson

Everyone’s had the experience: you purchase a new album, take it home and are appalled. Burdened by your disappointment you return to the stereo a couple of days later, and it’s almost as though someone has replaced the disc, you find a couple of melodies or ideas that strike you on second listen. Then you return, again, and again, and all of a sudden you’re listening daily to an album that you almost hocked at Cheapo. Idigaragua did this to me, odd, slightly off-putting, yet ultimately entrancing.

I’m not trying to tell you that Idigaragua is a transcendent album, to the contrary it’s quite jarring, but that’s part of its charm. Idigaragua is a musical, a story, where pirates make journalists walk the plank (an allegorical tale the resonates heavily with the perils of Bush Doctrine) and the concept always comes first (after it’s initial release For Wilson Riot and The Bedlam theatre actually put on a production of Idigaragua). It’s an indie-rock album, influenced equally by Queen, The Pixies, and West Side Story.

The album is quirky, and sporadic. The opener, “The Birds Turn Violent,” oscillates from a slowly strummed guitar and Kate Bush-esque vocals to A Night at the Opera style guitar rock, then transitions to a heavy, scream-laden, chest-beating, carnival of sound in “The Geek of Ciegozia.” What’s maybe most disquieting about the album is that it falls somewhere in-between being the soundtrack to a musical and being an ultra-quirky indie-rock album, in an attempt to fuse the two the album becomes incredibly varied and difficult to pin down. But maybe that’s what is so engaging, it’s an album that is willing to take chances and toy with your expectations. Despite it’s chaotic construction and slightly over-the-top theatrics, it comes together with clever lyrics, a successful allegory, and a forward thinking concept in a fashion that fits so unexpectedly that it is hard not to be engaged by Fort Wilson Riot.

www.fortwilsonriot.com

Filed under: Music Reviews