I’ve been putting off this review for a while. A Cuckoo’s Destination Unknown basically turned up on the doorstep about a week ago with a request to review, but while I like music and writing and writing about music more than most, when the Ricky-in-chief asks you to write a review of something specific suddenly it all seems kinda like, well, work. Not that I’m currently overrun with what most people would call work, but that’s another story.

The real problem with writing this review, though, is that after listening to A Cuckoo’s debut album, I’m really not sure what A Cuckoo is, exactly, and I’m even less clear on what he’s trying to do with Destination Unknown.

And it’s not like I’m a neophyte to music that’s different. I’m not completely unaccustomed to being perplexed by exactly what I’m listening to. I mean, I liked Portishead’s last album, I’ve listened to a lot of mid-60s John Coltrane, I’ve been around the block a few times. But I don’t completely get this.

A Cuckoo’s website says that he “creates a dusty and nostalgic blend of acoustic based esoteric poetry…[t]he sound can be described as the reminiscent echoes of a dusty sepia tinted past.”

Now, I think “acoustic based esoteric poetry” roughly translates to “music with words” and I think the latter part of the quote means he likes old timey instruments and sounds, which bears out on the CD. I mean, there’s words, and there’s music, featuring bells, music boxes, glockenspiels, various strings, and melotrons, which individually are very well played and sound quite pretty, and are almost all apparently played by A Cuckoo himself, as the only other instrument credits in the liner notes are to one violinist and one cello player. There’s a kind of ethereal quality to A Cuckoo’s voice, which makes it somewhat easier to deal with the frequently simple lyrics and rhymes, such as the chorus from “The Girl From My Dreams,” which goes something like “you’re my heaven, I want to be with you tonight, you’re my heaven, you make me feel all right, you’re my heaven, I want to stay with you tonight, you’re my heaven, I want to stay with you tonight.”

Where Destination Unknown starts to lose me is when everything comes together. It’s all too much, too overwrought, too busy. The same kind of thinking that wrote that A Cuckoo “creates a dusty and nostalgic blend of acoustic based esoteric poetry” to describe his “music with words” permeates the the whole album. It features some solid ideas and good playing that are over-thought and overproduced to the point that they’re hard to pick out of the resulting quagmire. On his website, under “Details,” there’s a full-length paragraph written about every song; the stories the lyrics tell, the musical influences, what certain intros and outros and musical passages signify, etc., etc. But if you have to explain it in that much detail, and A Cuckoo does, because very little of what’s written there came through when I actually listened to the album, it might mean you’re cramming too much into each song.

It’s too bad, because after listening to this and reading the guy’s website, I want to like this album. I appreciate intelligent thought, and A Cuckoo clearly put a lot of it into this. He clearly wants this to be his magnum opus, something very artistic and meaningful. But it comes across like an overblown vanity project from a guy who played all the instruments, fell in love with each part, and tried to cram everything he did into every song. He could really use another experienced hand in the mix, a producer to reign in his more extreme creative impulses and make some practical decisions. But while A Cuckoo is listed with most of the instrument and song credits, he also did almost everything else; Bob Bradley is listed as producer, arranger, and mixer, and a pretty quick Wikipedia search tells you Bob Bradley and A Cuckoo are the same person.

In the end, it’s not unpleasant to listen to and there’s a lot to appreciate in it, but only if you can manage to separate the elements that are worth appreciating from everything else that’s going on at the same time. I do applaud Bradley for trying, because I’d much rather support someone who tried to do something a little different and produced his grand artistic vision and didn’t quite get there than I would someone who set out to follow the current trend and make the same old same old and succeeded. But this doesn’t quite get there for me.

2/5

(if he sounds kind of interesting to you, I’d recommend heading over to A Cuckoo’s Myspace page, where he has a cover version of “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, along with some tracks from the album. It’s kind of neat)

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