| Cloud Cult - Feel Good Ghosts |
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| Written by Steve McPherson | |
| Tuesday, April 29, 2008 at 11:54 AM | |
 Cloud Cult Feel Good Ghosts (Tea-Partying Through Tornadoes) Earthology Records I doubt that Cloud Cult see it exactly this way, but their records involve a big gamble on the part of the listener. If there's one quality that links all of their music, it's unabashed sentimentality, and that's something that can make people uncomfortable. Sentiment can't be wrangled into sense by criticism, and so it's easier to simply trash anything with a whiff of sentiment—from Celine Dion to Death Cab for Cutie to Cloud Cult—than it is to try and open yourself and let it in. There are plenty of moments on Feel Good Ghosts that are embarrassing after the fashion of your parents trying to pronounce words like "heezy" and "skrilla" or dance to LCD Soundsystem. When Craig Minowa—who's once again returned to taking care of most of the instrumental duties aside from drums and strings on this, the band's eighth album—starts almost rapping at the beginning of "The Tornado Lessons," it veers precipitously towards corny, and perhaps over the edge. But that same recklessness is also what has always driven Cloud Cult's most powerful moments. In "Happy Hippo," Minowa sang, "I like my happy hippopotamus / she's sleeping under my matt-uh-ress / She shows me Jesus at the bottom of a Colt 45," and the conflation of an image as fanciful and childlike as a happy hippo under your bed with the idea of religion in drinking is the kind of payoff that only such a risk can provide. Likewise, Feel Good Ghosts has plenty of gut-punch moments, as in "May Your Hearts Stay Strong" when the song's quirky love story derails into real life with the leaden line, "Turn wedding gowns to angel clothes for the baby to wear." It's also telling that in the chorus of that song, Minowa doesn't wish for all your wishes to come true—he just hopes that they'll be simple, and therefore easier to fulfill. Much is made of Cloud Cult's sense of childlike wonder and the optimism that puts them in line with wantonly cheery groups like The Polyphonic Spree, but Feel Good Ghosts shows more than a sunny veneer. Minowa has always been dealing with the way that naïvete can both help and hinder you, protecting your heart by emboldening it but also opening it up to attack by making you vulnerable. "The Will of a Volcano" drowns its cutesy lyrics ("You have a precious little mind / You paint a perfect little rainbow") in so much sonic bluster that it sounds as if the band is setting up a battle royale between hope and disaster incarnate. And so your ability to enjoy Feel Good Ghosts is going to depend largely on your ability to trust and be okay with the occasional lyrical clunker and overwrought arrangement. If you can drop your defenses, there's plenty of magic on the record, from the choppy digital funk of "No One Said It Would Be Easy" to the spaghetti western country shuffle of "Journey of the Featherless" to the simple acoustic beauty of "The Ghost Inside Our House," which may be Cloud Cult's most straightforwardly beautiful and genuine moment. In it, Minowa affirms his commitment to the breadth and depth of life, including icky sentiment and the simple pleasures of catchiness, when he sings that life is like a song—a hummable song. Stream "The Ghost Inside Our House" below: |
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| Last Updated: Tuesday, April 29, 2008 at 06:27 PM |
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