REINO ERMITAñO
Rituales Interiores
(I Hate)

HARVEY MILK
Life...The Best Game in Town
(Hydra Head)

CAPILLARY ACTION
So Embarrassing
(Pangaea)

STALINGRAD
S/T
(Self-Released)

SLOW HORSE
Rusher
(Sophomore Lounge)

MAR DE GRISES
Raining the Waterhearts

(Firebox)

BIGELF
Cheat the Gallows 

(Custard)

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Oh man. This is one bath in gold, bubbly and bloated, chiseled with a butter knife, super turdy grandiloquent, histrionic enough to downsize the career of Sir Laurence Olivier, Meatloaf-esque mother of a record. Yes. If you like music that is literally grander than life, orchestrated to the last note of that trombone, fluffier than Gulliver’s pillow and expresses more in its fifty-six minutes of silly bipolarity than an Iraq war vet with a post-war traumatic disorder, check this out now. You’ll think Mr. Marvin Lee Aday is the man in charge of the intonation and his partner in crime, the always glove-clad Jim Steinman, penned these exhausting songs behind his seventy-foot piano. Sure, Cheat the Gallows wouldn’t be the huge birthday balloon that it is without the inclusion of violins, violas, cellos, trumpets, flutes, horns and trombones. It all serves a purpose of course; it’s fancy work that accentuates the already worked up melodies and the rollercoaster of melodramatic up and downs that Cheat the Gallows is.

In some respect I think that Bigelf has taken the “Bohemian Rhapsody” mold and has reworked their own versions of it into ten sweet slices of overblown over the top theatrics. It helps that the songs are rather compact because had they just jammed on each of the melodies for longer than two minutes this album would have been simply unbearable. Certainly, there is focus here. This California quartet is not indulgent in their playing, it’s their songwriting that is overwrought with emotions and enough horns to have Peta bitching.

The best parts of Cheat the Gallows are the most open jams like “Blackball”, which in its third minute gets truly stellar with Deep Purple-esque Blackmorian licks. It’s good stuff that is being openly advertised as prog rock, which is about three quarters truth, because by now the current teenage generation has a whole different concept of what this genre is. Let’s just say that The Mars Volta, Bigelf is so not. The latter’s trip is much more 70’s oriented, and there is no excessive fuckery in instrument wanking. Like I said before, it’s just the songwriting that’s pure gluttony.

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