Review:
New Orleans Swim Team: To Be Something, To Be Anything
If lyrics have ever made an impact on you in the slightest, then give this album a shot. New Orleans Swim Team is the project of the prodigious, Albertan youth, Jacob Ulickij. This is a record that many will find enjoyable, but only the attentive listeners can truly relish its every nuance. To Be Something, To Be Anything opens like a smooth transition from consciousness to euphoric daydream. It unravels with a healthy blend of neoclassical and indie-folk, though at the first line of lyrics, the album certainly attains a leaning towards the latter sound. What will first strike you as unorthodox is the spoken-word format, which we must concede is a rare, unexplored aspect of vocalism in music. However, I am certainly glad Jacob chooses this style for the majority of the album, as such depth can only be conveyed in this fashion.
I want to call to mind the authorship Jacob demonstrates with his writing. The lyrics often function as their own rhythmic essays. This particular style is Jacob’s way of scrutinizing the short stories of his life like a literary critic, identifying the innate flaws of his cerebrum and forgiving himself for the self-induced consequences. To Be Something, To Be Anything’s second track, “You Were No Ground Level Limb” brings a response of closure to the opening song of New Orleans Swim Team’s EP, Sitting On Fences. It is best summarized in the line, “You‘re an eight-year-old memory that is tarnished, not golden,” as it gives the listener a sense of overcoming the romanticized perspective of an equally troubled, equally flawed person with ways of getting around his/her weaknesses.
Some parts of the recording itself can be as reflectively imperfect and dissonant as the artist portrays himself to be. But I don’t want this to come off as such a negative comment; when I look at my journals, I see misspellings, illegible sentences crossed out, even a blood stain or two. If someone cares to go through my journals, while considering their context, he/she would see it fit to overlook such causes for nit-picking. When you understand the personal direction in which Jacob Ulickij endeavors in To Be Something, To Be Anything, any critical focus on the instrumentation should be suspended for the sake of the album’s quest for human growth. He is an ambitious and flowering multi-instrumentalist, who is constantly honing his sound, and, feast your ears, he happens to hit the bull’s eye in several climactic moments.
The song “Plaster” is ominously beautiful in its delivery. It seems like an inside story we can only speculate through its allegorical subject matter. However, within the context of searching for a lost cause on a desert highway, the line “every dead animal is a false alarm” is one of the most heartbreaking lines in the whole album. This, coupled with the somber female vocals dampening amidst the silence, is a dramatic yet delicate experimentation in audible expression. One of the hallmarks of this album is its essence of being made solely for Jacob’s personal assessment. He puts up a mirror and confronts what it reveals, while any stranger can listen and see what he sees.
To Be Something, To Be Anything is an example of a person severely affected by the vastly unknown brevity of time, space, and people. It haunts him, enlightens him, confuses, and consoles him while the music proves itself to be a superbly fitting trail for this near-hour-long human excursion.
http://neworleansswimteam.bandcamp.com/album/to-be-something-to-be-anything
