These can be found via the familiar sounding Shins-lite “Dead Petals” which again references Bush and first showed up on Fogel’s 2007 EP One Day in the Desert before he became Golden Bloom, the pleasant, positive but predictable love song “If You Believe” and an uneven half-successfully ambitious attempt at paying homage to a Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band Beatles technique in “Theme for an Adventure at Sea.”
For a closer, he adds in a surprise minute-long rant aptly titled “Your Minute of Fame” which referenced the recent former Illinois Governor Blagojevich debacle that he’s hoping will appeal to Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert.
And although again politics were the “outside agitator” (to use a ‘60s phrase) which inspired a majority of the work, overall Fogel’s Golden Bloom manages to morph all of the madness of the previous years into multifaceted melodies.
Layering on all of his own instrumental work on the piano, bass guitar, keyboards, harmonica, drums, and tenor sax into rhythms you can dance to and lyrics which remind us that it’s okay not to completely understand how to process what we’ve been faced with as a nation either — in the end Fan the Flames is proof that sometimes the best process is through a process like music itself.
Track-List
1) E.H.M
2) Doomsday Devices
3) Fan the Flames
4) She Leaves Me Poetry
5) The Flight at the End of the Tunnel
6) Dead Petals
7) If You Believe
8) The Mountainside Says
9) Theme for an Adventure at Sea
10) (Unlisted) Your Minute of Fame
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