Pitchfork

If Louis Farrakhan should ever decide to enhance his famously incendiary brand of oratory with Supremes-style back-up singers (picture three lovely, impeccably coifed ladies in sequin gowns, elbow-length gloves and bow-ties oooh-aah-oooh'ing about "Zionist Conspiracies") he might very well settle on the Marvelous Farraquettes as their title. At which point these guys will just have to choose a new name. But sticking with the Likely, they'll get to keep their name and people will continue asking themselves, "What the hell is (a) Faraquet?" After listening to the band, though, they'll decide that it doesn't much matter because the name, like Faraquet's singular brand of rock, just sounds cool.

During my first semester at a certain overrated university on New York's Upper-West side, the Ministry of Housing placed me in a tiny room with a prep-schooler named Neil. Though eventually we became great friends, that first semester was a real goddamned trial. Skipping straight to the point, our musical tastes clashed. Badly. Like oily cat and watery dog.

Sure, over time we performed our little token exchanges-- I came to enjoy the De La Soul album he blared incessantly, and Neil quit rolling his eyes and saying, "Kill your mother!" in his faux-demon voice while making the heavy metal hand gesture when I'd put on my music. Or my "music" as he preferred. And no, I wasn't listening to fucking Black Metal or anything of that sort. Rather, those were the years when I was listening, almost exclusively, to a handful of Dischord bands. I remember running down the list of them, hoping one would break the streak: Fugazi ("Kill your mother!"), Nation of Ulysses (a truly heartfelt "Kill your mother!"), umm... let's see, Jawbox (unjustifiably, "Kill your mother!"), Minor Threat (well, you can imagine), and so on.

The first thing that came to mind when I'd finished listening to The View from This Tower was how I wished it'd been around in 1996. A Dischord band to stump Neil! Not even he could've kill-your-mother'd Faraquet in good faith.

At the risk of earning myself another cheeky missive from a jazz snob, I'm going to invoke the genre in vain and simply say that Faraquet "has horns." Their riffs whir and run circles around your head. Scarcely a moment is left unadorned by Chad Molter's tight drumming. Devin Ocampo's spindly, spidery guitar lines virtuosically toe the line between scorching and wanky. On the harder, more discordant songs, mood and direction zigzag violently while the quieter stretches of the album lend those same deft maneuvers calm and entrance, like time-lapse photography or stoner laser-light shows. But though the vestiges are there, this ain't Smart Went Crazy. It's more like Crazy got smart, taking astronomy classes and intensive music courses.

Say Thrill Jockey fucked Dischord and the resulting child lived long enough to get a taste for, among other things, Synchronicity-era Police. Odd time signatures, tempo change-ups, the occasional use of brass-- in short, all the things on a "rock" record that would normally send people screaming from the room. They're all here in abundance. Did I mention cellos? Congas? It all works perfectly.

Nothing about The View from This Tower sounds the least bit contrived or "experimental"-- it's exactly as it should be. They aren't going to change any lives with this one, but quietly and effectively, Faraquet has issued a challenge to their peers: to expand their musical lexicon and range of expression, and throw off some of that stifling rock and roll orthodoxy.

There's some biblical passage and it goes something like, "If your faith was as big as a mustard seed, you could move a mountain." I'm not trying to get holy on you or anything, but Faraquet reminded me of that, albeit incongruously. If you could replace only 1% of all the unconscionably shitty bands out there with bands like Faraquet... well, you get my drift.