Head of Femur

Head of Femur
Hysterical Stars
[SpinArt; 2005]
Rating: 7.9

There's so much to discuss about Head of Femur's sophomore album, Hysterical Stars, that it's difficult to know where to begin. For starters, the trio employs 27 guest musicians on these 13 tracks, and every song is packed to the gills with sounds and melodies and countermelodies and detours and left-turn movements. It's maximalism in the extreme-- and with barely time to breathe between brass charts, peals of synthesizer, elaborate string parts, and big three-part harmonies, it's easy to get lost in the
labyrinthine arrangements.

Additionally, the album fits nicely alongside the Fiery Furnaces' Blueberry Boat and Architecture in Helsinki's In Case We Die in a recent string of albums that might best be described as "hyperprog": The entire record plays as a long, winding suite, where one crazy idea never has to wait long to meet its match, and songs explode into headlong gallops only to capitulate seconds later into fluttering orchestral passages or odd accordion solos. As with all hyperprog outings, short attention spans are likely to enjoy the album's grab-bag nature, while big-picture people will appreciate the great unified sweep of it all.

Head of Femur don't wait long to posit their more-is-more theory, kicking
down the door to their technicolor world with "Elliott Gould Is in California Split", a song that makes their jam-packed 2003 debut Ringodom or
Proctor seem restrained by comparison. Super Furry harmonies and taut basslines weave through a teeming forest of violins, glockenspiels,
trumpets, and jittery guitars, spilling into rock passages that sound like a
hundred different Beach Boys ringtones going off simultaneously. A track bearing the title of their previous album follows, swooping in with baroque strings, wild horns, XTC-ish guitars, and falsetto oohing and aahing. In fact, it goes through so many different sections, the band could probably have made six songs out of it. But then, that seems to be the point.

In the midst of all the marching-band-in-a-penny-arcade madness there are a few songs that step back a (little) bit from the brink of aural overload and show the band for the skilled tunesmiths they are. "Skirts Are Takin' Over" is an oceanic ballad anchored by piano and mellotron, limiting horns and other instruments to broad textural strokes. Likewise, "Easy Street" is loaded with all manner of instrumentation, focused into one solidly conventional pop song with laser-like efficiency. "Oh You're Blue" boasts an amazing string arrangement that segues seamlessly into a rococo orchestral
passage. And of course, it splits off into several other directions from there, all of which is better listened to than described.

Hysterical Stars closes on its most majestic note with "Jack and the Water Buffalo", a song that descends from fairly dry, modest beginnings into a cavernous, reverb-drenched second half, aided by brooding cello and a
fantastic piano part. It basically takes five minutes to achieve what most
of the songs on the album accomplish in half that time, but in doing so lays
bare the incredible amount of craft this album must have taken to assemble.
Even the album's greatest failure (the ponderous, nonsensical, and ultimately annoying "Sausage Canoe") is intricately and intelligently arranged. There are so many elements to mentally catalog that the first listen is a severe shock to the senses, a musical equivalent of what Dorothy might have felt like when first stepping out of her house into Oz.

-Joe Tangari, June 3, 2005 - Pitchfork Media

HEAD OF FEMUR The songs on Hysterical Stars (SpinArt), Head of Femur's
second album, frequently sound fit to burst. This time around the three guys
at the core of this Chicago orch-pop collective--singer and guitarist Matt
Focht, keyboardist and drummer Ben Armstrong, and guitarist and bassist Mike
Elsener--surround themselves with an even bigger crew of accompanists than
they did on their 2003 debut, Ringodom or Proctor, setting their airless pop
melodies to dense symphonic arrangements. Fortunately the band sounds more
sure-footed, not just better staffed, and the songs are less indebted to
stale indie-rock verities--but they still haven't learned to take a breath
every now and again. Focht delivers his verbose lyrics in a sprint--even on
ballads--and though the thick layers of brass and strings are meticulously
placed and executed, they tend to gild the lily. It's hard not to admire
Head of Femur's Brian Wilson-esque ambitions, but I wish I had an
opportunity to hear these songs without the glitz. This show, a
record-release party, won't be it: a 21-piece group will play the album in
its entirety. Mark Mallman plays second and Devin Davis opens. 10 PM,
Subterranean Cafe & Cabaret, 2011 W. North, 773-278-6600 or 800-594-8499,
$10. --Peter Margasak - Chicago Reader

5/5 - Head of the New Pop Class

Imagine General Public and the Polyphonic Spree jamming with Conor Oberst and Mike Mogis, and yyou have a pretty good idea of what Head of Femur have to offer. If You think that sounds like a mess, it's not - in fact, Hysterical Stars is one of the most exciting indie-rock releases to come down the pike in quite some time. Frontman Matt Focht's pipes perfectly complement the dramatic, catchy, and sometimes schizophrenic music (made by no less than 30 contributors) that features everthing from trumpets to saxes to tuba to some truly gorgeous piano. This is the kind of pop that makes you feel cooler for just knowing it exists.

Marc Hawthorne - Alternative Press

Horns, strings instrumental to Head of Femur

May 27, 2005

BY JIM DeROGATIS, POP MUSIC CRITIC

Touring the indie-rock way is hard enough, driving cross-country in a van and sleeping on friends' floors. It's even more difficult when you have to cram eight people plus assorted horns and a double bass into the van. So you have to hand it to Chicago's Head of Femur for ambition, if nothing else.

"If you had to put a label on us, I suppose 'ork-pop' would be apt, just because we do tour with orchestral instruments," vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Ben Armstrong says. "They do figure prominently in the sound, and they're on 80 percent of the live material. So if the qualifications for being an ork-pop band are the presence of horns and strings, I guess by default, that's what we are."

Actually, the three key members of Head of Femur are, first and foremost,
great pop songwriters in the tradition of '60s heroes such as the Beach Boys
and the Left Banke. Orchestrating their material is less of a novelty for
them -- as it is for some groups in the ork-pop genre -- than a means to realize the complicated sounds in their heads.

Armstrong, Mike Elsener and Matt Focht have been making music together for more than a decade, since they played in a band called Pablo's Triangle in their native Lincoln, Neb., often sharing bills with the fellow Omaha group Bright Eyes. When their first band split up, Elsener moved to San Francisco, Focht moved to New York and Armstrong relocated in Chicago. After a three-year break, they decided to make music again, and since Chicago was midway between the coasts, it was the ideal compromise.

"We've gotten a lot of breaks due to the nature of the Chicago scene that
possibly wouldn't have happened anywhere smaller, like Lincoln," Armstrong says. "They possibly wouldn't have happened anywhere bigger, like New York or San Francisco, either. Chicago has been good for us. It's a warm scene with a lot of good bands, a lot of helpful people and so many good clubs that it makes it hard to pick where to play."

The bounty of musicians in Chicago also has made it easy for Head of Femur to realize its ork-pop dreams.

"When we started, we wanted to sound like '60s pop, Left Banke-type music, and we didn't, but we got closer when we added the horns and strings," Armstrong says. "There was a violin player living in the house we practiced in, and we had a very good friend who is a trumpet player." One by one, other instruments were added to the mix until the band's 2001 debut, "Ringodom or Proctor," became a lush, symphonic affair.

The band's new album "Hysterical Stars" is even more ambitious, with the three core members -- who trade off on vocals, guitar, keyboards and
percussion -- augmented by trombone, tuba, trumpet, violin, cello, French
horn, flute and even a harp. The group will expand to 21 instruments -- "The
only thing that will be missing is harp, unless someone wants to donate the
money to fly her out from California," Armstrong says -- when Head of Femur celebrates its new release by playing the album in its entirety at
Subterranean.

"For the new record, we wrote for whatever instruments we felt like and
worried about finding them later," Armstrong says. "Thankfully, we were able to locate every instrument we wrote for, and nothing was compromised."

None of the three musicians are formally trained, but they're able to realize their complex arrangements with help from a computer program called Finale, which scores instrumentation for orchestra.

"I used to write it out by hand with a quill with a feather on it," Armstrong jokes. "But this is a hell of a lot easier. All of the musical parts are written out for the people who come in; it isn't a situation where we say, 'Oh, we want saxophone; let's bring a sax player in to solo over this part.'"

Head of Femur is at its best when it's most concrete. "Elliott Gould Is in California Split," which opens the new album, evokes a feeling of Hollywood decadence, while "Jack and the Water Buffalo" tells a haunting story set during the Vietnam War. Occasionally, the group gets too whimsical for its own good -- as in the tune "The Sausage Canoe" -- but even then, it's hard to resist the gorgeous arrangements.

"This album is more of a collection of songs that we have been writing over
the past two years while touring," Elsener says. Adds Armstrong, "'Ringodom'
was pretty much conceived and composed in that order, whereas with this one, it was like going through our backlog of songs that were complete or mostly complete and fleshing them out and recording them."

"We'd be happy with 10,000 records sold," Focht concludes. "And we'd like
people to come out to see the shows. What we want to accomplish is just
being able to sustain the band as an independent entity without having to
throw thousands of our dollars into it. And, of course, quitting our jobs would be nice."


- Chicago Sun Times

Head of Femur @ Subterranean;
Fri 27

As the revival spotlight continues to shine on such disparate genres as garage rock and post-punk, orchestral pop is due for a comeback and for the Chicago music scene, it's come in the form of Head of Femur. After paying their dues among the emo brethren of their hometown of Omaha, Mike Elsener, Ben Armstrong and Matt Focht took a turn for the sophisticated upon moving here, branching out from the sensitive indie rock patented by their friends in Bright Eyes (for whom Focht also drums) and concocting a lush sonic majesty more akin to the art-pop of the Flaming Lips and Mercury Rev.

The band's grand instrumentation ideas often stretch far beyond the standard guitar/bass/drums setup, so Head of Femur often turns to its friends here in town (friends who just happened to have played with everyone from the Sea and Cake to Poi Dog Pondering) to add layers of strings, horns and piano. With nods to the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds and Love's Forever Changes, Head of Femur's 2003 debut, Ringodom or Proctor, was an awesome orchestral epic, complete with tight harmonies that were quirky and heartfelt all at once. No wonder both Bright Eyes and Wilco have enlisted the octet as an opening act.
Head of Femur's latest, Hysterical Stars, is full of lighthearted bombast,
where gleefully ragged vocals cut through elaborate kitchen-sink arrangements, although sometimes the overwrought strings lead the
proceedings into Moody Blues territory. To celebrate the record's release,
the band has assembled a 21-piece orchestra to play the album in its
entirety. If you're tired of the usual rock-guitar blare, this is sure to be
a spectacle of epic proportions.

Ben Taylor - Time Out Chicago

Band of 21 shares spotlight while mining spectacular sounds

May 30, 2005

BY ANDERS SMITH LINDALL

Relatively speaking, the Chicago pop group Head of Femur isn't well known
-- at least not yet. But with a new album, "Hysterical Stars," just issued
by the respected New York indie label SpinArt, it's only a matter of time before the band's name recognition begins to catch up with its outsize
ambition.

That ambition was on full display Friday at Subterranean in Wicker Park,
where Head of Femur crammed no fewer than 21 players onstage for a
celebratory record-release show. It must have taken a blueprint to plan
the stage plot and a wealth of patience to run the sound check: In addition to the band's core trio of Matt Focht (vocals), Michael Elsener (guitar) and Ben Armstrong (keyboards), this gig's lineup included a string section, numerous brass and woodwinds, both upright and electric basses, drums, percussion, xylophone and banjo.

In an hourlong set, this merry menagerie faithfully recreated the
sprawling orchestration of "Hysterical Stars," playing its 13 songs in order.

The disc packs a dazzling array of sounds, and Friday's lineup gave the
band a rare chance to explore them all onstage -- often within the same
song. "Oh You're Blue," which started as a spare duet between Armstrong's
piano and Focht's voice, bloomed in Technicolor midway through. Similar
dynamic shifts marked "Skirts Are Takin' Over," which wound up in a noisy haze of sawing strings and blaring horns. There was flinty, concise rock in "Percy," New Orleans swagger in "Born in the Seventies," an aptly
shaggy, shambling country-soul vibe to "Song for Richard Manuel" and even
a goofy, tootling kiddie-pop tune, "The Sausage Canoe."

Not all of this was technically flawless, but band and crowd shared a happy-go-lucky view of the proceedings. At one point, when the strings were apparently playing in a key different from the rest of the group, the violinists just laughed and rolled their eyes at their charts.

Focht, too, was self-effacing. Though he writes the words and sings them,
he hardly hogged the spotlight; "I never was good at stage banter," he
confided Friday. A somewhat pinched and only modestly expressive vocalist,
he knows his band's greatest strength is its widescreen vision, and on
stage he smartly let his 20 accomplices take the lead. Typical Focht patter: "Here's another song you might like."

He was right about that. Friday's fans ate it up.

The band's modest bearing shouldn't obscure the fact it's at the fore of a
deeper, more promising local pop scene than any in recent years. On the strength of "Hysterical Stars" and more superlative gigs like this one,
Head of Femur seems poised to win wider attention for the local resurgence and some well-deserved acclaim for themselves. - Chicago Sun Times