All Smiles - Staylow and Mighty
MMM
All Smiles is the braindchild of Jim Fairchild, better known as guitarist for Grandaddy and, now, Modest Mouse. On All Smiles’ third full-length album, Staylow and Mighty, Fairchild crosses the jittery, lively, traveling guitar riffs of Modest Mouse with the orchestral, spacey instrumentation of Grandaddy. It’s an album that plays with a loose and easy character, never coming across as anything but a relaxed, creative outlet for Fairchild to take the songwriting reins.
Records these days can tend to get rather heavy-handed, or heavy-hearted, not necessarily in terms of production, but in terms of how they are executed. So many records are too precise and perfect in sound that you wonder where the humanness has gone. And while it’s true such records can also be especially enjoyable for how exact they are, there’s no denying that the raw emotion that fueled and inspired the music in the first place can, occasionally, get smothered by the sheen of production. Staylow and Mighty is an album with its imperfections – a sour vocal note here or there, for example – but that’s what makes it real.
