“DD Review: Dignan Porch – Don’t Try it EP/Golden Beak EP”

Scores: 0/10; 3/10

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Indianapolis’ downtown location of Luna Records went out of business the better part of a decade ago, unfortunately. But if it were still erect, Dignan Porch’s Don’t Try it EP would be enough to put it under, to be sure.
Melody is a funny thing because it’s ALWAYS enough to make for a good song, stylistic plurality, quirkiness or time and effort aside. In short, this new Dignan Porch material is the work of musicians who THINK that they’ve assembled melodies — the types of things which allowed Deerhunter and Iron & Wine et. al. to get away with some stylistic laziness or simplism, perhaps — and so slacken the reins on things like technical skill, emotional intensity and basically just class rendered as modification of the norm to any extent. There’s no doubt: this would be the exact music playing in my version of He**. If this thing were an LP and not a shorty it would be like that Dilbert cartoon where he gets caught in that vestibule and goes through what he experiences as 100,000 years when it was only two minutes in Earth time, upon release yelling the complaint “Yes I was bored, thanks for asking!”
And oh, gee, here’s just what I need: another phallic album title, “golden beak” (I just got done reviewing a Godspeed You! Black Emperor album, for Christ’s sake). Well, right away, the instrumentation steps its game up a bit, surfacing in the form of albeit perhaps excessive theremin on the titled track (I’m guessing the band just can’t afford a synth), and this galloping bass keeps plaguing the groove in an innovative way, vaguely bespeaking rockabilly. Yeah, I can just see this band like starving to death like those people on “Van Life” (a skit courtesy of the great Guilty Subconscious), and being like PLEASE LIKE US! PLEASE STREAM US… I MEAN BUY US! Well, honeys, it’d be a whole lot easier if you’d but a single phrasing unorthodoxy, key change, he** even a PAUSE would help, anywhere here in the action. “Slow Legs in the Dream” may feature the least inspiring guitar solo of all time. It’s so boring it makes me wanna bust out Spoon’s Gimme Fiction again and like relive my collegiate glory days, playing beer pong by myself. Even that would be less depressing.