Furia OEM Review
Furia/The War Against Silence review. A fairly negative review of One Eyed Man. Congratulations.
Author: Glenn McDonald.
Date: 12 July 2001.
Original URL: http://www.furia.com/twas/twas0337.html
And if Neil Finn heads out on the voyage of exploration I want him to undertake, I’d like him to drag ex-Hunters and Collectors vocalist Mark Seymour along, too. One Eyed Man, Seymour’s second solo album (King Without a Clue, the first, although I only recently reviewed it, came out all the way back in 1997), finds him settled into a comfortable rock groove on the order of Tom Cochrane or whatever mildly-successful artist you’d prefer to substitute, some patently decent craftsman you wouldn’t remember for ten minutes if you didn’t have a sentimental connection to his past life. This is a good album, filled with good songs, and I can’t imagine a single reason to recommend it to you unless you already love H&C enough that their memory alone is worth an album purchase. I listen to it like I’m visiting an old friend in the hospital, happy to see them and glad to be part of the process of sustaining their spirit while the doctors work on their body, but it’s not much of a spectator sport. I want to hook Seymour up with Pete Townshend, or Mike Edwards, or Tricky. I’m proud of him for learning to write his own songs (with and without help), so he can keep being a musician without his old band, but if he went on tour and played nothing but old H&C songs, none of these new ones, I doubt anybody would complain much. And I think he knows that. I was proud of him for making it through King Without a Clue’s bonus live EP without retreating to any H&C songs, but it didn’t last. “On My Way Home” ends, nominally the last song on One Eyed Man, there’s a weird little instrumental throat-clearing noise, and then in one violent twitch Mark undoes all twelve steps of his post-band recovery effort by marching, oblivious to the consequences, through a wholly unnecessary new version of “Throw Your Arms Around Me”. As he comes audibly alive, singing it, the rest of the songs on the album crumble and disappear. They so clearly mean so much less to him than this one old one, why should I care differently?
The first H&C song Mark Seymour released was “Holy Grail” on the “You Don’t Have To Cry Anymore” single. A tour of H&C songs would not make a number of fans happy.
