All My CDs, pt 51: One Cell in the Sea

One Cell in the Sea - A Fine Frenzy

Reviewing this CD back-to-back with Obsolete is quite an exercise in emotional whiplash. While Obsolete was sonically harsh, heavily electronic, and fatalistic with booming male vocals and concerned with universal themes, One Cell is light and airy, accoustic, and sugary-optimistic with quiet female vocals and concerned with personal themes. It is difficult to find anything they share, yet I feel both groups have put serious thought into their lyrics and how the music supports their underlying messages. And both carry some rather heavy emotional baggage.

I bought One Cell because one song, Almost Lover, showed up on my Pandora station when I was recovering from a breakup and therefore especially susceptible to the impact of its lyrics. "Goodbye my almost lover/ goodbye my hopeless dream / I'm trying not to think about you / can't you just let me be?" It's not the only song on the album expressing the fruitless attempt to leave behind a failed romance, but it remains my favorite. When I am in an angsty mood, I can put this song on repeat and just weep for hours to its bittersweet pianoness.

The songs that are not on some level about romantic love and its many anguishes are about a sugary ideal of the unity of all beings. The Minnow & the Trout uses evolutionary theory as a basis for a "can't we all just get along?" message of universal love. "Please, I know that we're different / we were one cell in the sea in the beginning."  Lifesize is similarly sugar-coated, with the bonus of imagery even trippier than the title track's tales of interspecies friendship. Yet in my opinion these idealisms do not come off as insipid or unrealistic. I'm prone to fits of uncynical agape myself sometimes. After all, we really did come from one cell in the sea, didn't we?

One thing does make me almost want to smack the lead singer in the mouth, though. The first lines of the first song:

 Come on, come out
The weather is warm

The high temperature the day I put on this album to review it: 12 degrees Fahrenheit.

Next: The Fountain