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Eponymous
Arms Of Kismet
Wampus Multimedia, 2004
REVIEW BY: Jason Warburg
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: 01/30/2004
I get a lot of inquiries from indie artists and labels thesedays. The majority of these inquiries get forwarded to the DailyVault's home office for response and distribution to the rest ofour writing staff.
The ones that don't -- the ones I pull aside and answer myself-- inevitably have some kind of hook that gets my attention. Eitherthe band's bios and promos reference favorite artists of mine, orthey have an intriguing way of presenting themselves, or theytarget my weak spot… they hook me with their words.
Arms Of Kismet is singer-songwriter-multinstrumentalist MarkDoyon and a handful of special guests (think Kurt Wallinger and the"band" World Party). In terms of attracting the attention of aword-geek like me, the smartest self-promotion Mark has done is toput up a Web sitethat includes the full lyrics from this disc. I'd been scanningthem for maybe two minutes when I said to myself "Anybody whowrites like this has got to be worth a listen."
Indeed. Each of the ten little vignettes presented on Eponymous inhabits its own universe of damaged peoplefeeling their way through life, maybe stumbling across an answer ortwo, or maybe not. Everything's just a little twisted and distortedhere -- for one thing, Doyon keeps you off-balance with his deftmixture of standard rock instrumentation with loops, textures andeffects -- and yet there's a definite sense of possibility lurkingabout as well.
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