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Fufkin, Shona Winfrey, June, 2004 timewellspent (Parasol) www.parasol.com U.S. Release Date: August
10, 2004 When You Want Something
Done Right It took about two years---as in 24 months---for timewellspent’s brainchild to gestate. That’s the amount of time Casey Fundaro and Christopher Moll, plus a handful of other musicians, spent recording their debut album. It’s the amount of time Moll spent producing and engineering it. When they finished, Thom Monahan of Pernice Brothers was asked, and agreed, to mix the record for them before they handed it off to Jeff Lipton, who’s also worked with Pernice Brothers, to master it. timewellspent met and took root when Fundaro, an established pop musician who’d drummed and sang in bands, on tribute compilations (and grew up around his professional rock 'n roller uncle, Three Dog Night vocalist Danny Hutton), placed an ad looking for a musician to work with around his home in South Florida. Enter multi-talent Chris Moll, also an established musician in South Florida, who can play, er, apparently most anything. And knows how to do, apparently, most everything else, that needs to be done to make a recording. The duo’s/project’s title, timewellspent, well-chosen as it is, doesn’t begin to reflect what these talents have birthed. They set about making a great sounding, well-produced contemporary pop record that would incorporate classic pop references and artists, without sounding retro. And slowly but surely, they’ve surpassed their expectations? It’s probably precise to reckon that Moll’s time consuming attention to detail with production, and both of their painstaking desire for new sounds with genuine instruments gave the album its multi-layered, textural sound and feel. The sounds are actually genuine, which is rare on a DIY-IYH record. What they couldn’t do themselves, they hired, not that there wasn’t much they couldn’t do. By the second full song on this album, “i know you” something else becomes quite evident: while this work is indeed heavily under the influence of ‘60s pop, the production is space-aged, twenty-first century. It’s Pet Sounds by Sparklehorse, Bacharach via Radiohead. My initial reaction to this record was of listening to songs through ocean waves, in aerated, washed colors. It’s still my reaction, and it does not imply muffled production. There’s something breezy and otherworldly to this record. There are sounds you might hear on rock records, on very out there indie records. This is not the sound of a "pop" record, until now. The other departure from the ordinary is the melancholia that permeates the album’s lyrical content on some songs, shifting to near-resolute optimism on alternate tracks. Somehow, in doing so, Fundaro has tweaked the typical boy meets girl loses boy pop song construct. Strung together at times by common, yet in this context, also the strangest things---voices talking, children bickering, people laughing---he’s composed a very intimate, smart series of songs that manage to be warm while avoiding cloying sentimentality, engaging without inducing paranoid claustrophobia. “anyone to be” must be one of the most beautiful, but anguished, songs ever written about the girl who got away. Even if she didn’t get that close. The album isn’t hurt in any way by his voice, a gorgeous tenor that did all of the vocals for the record---he has that “pop” voice. Just think: Elliott Smith, the Posies, Teenage Fanclub, the Beatles, the Beach Boys circa ’66. Pet Sounds fans will clamor after “deora”. The real prize here, on an entire album’s worth of gems, belongs to “effigy” with its whirling, half-psychedelic organs and unforgettable, stunner of a coda. While low-key in mood, timewellspent is ultimately a really great orchestral pop record, turned into leftfield a notch. There are super-fans of actual ‘60s pop out there who’ll be blown away by the spot-on reference to Bacharach and enchanted by the modern uses of Wurlitzer pianos. The rest of us might ponder how something this sophisticated can remain so poignant.
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