Album Review: Four Stroke Baron - "Data Diamond"

Be weird!  Revel in it!  These are the apparent tentpoles of color-outside-the-margins duo Four Stroke Baron, as they launch their newest effort “Data Diamond” onto an unsuspecting public.

Here’s a phrase you’ve never heard before – imagine a crossroads of three bands: Primus, 6:33 and Tears for Fears.  Now imagine that the creative minds of those three disparate entities have been told to write an album exclusively using the overall sonic tone of Korn.  If that sounds like an outlandish farce, that’s because a) it is, and b) no one has ever quite heard an album like “Data Diamond” before.

All the elements are here – the synth-based, overboard zaniness of the Frenchmen, the juxtaposed thump of Les Claypool’s signature band, and yes, even the smooth but anguished vocals of Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith.  What does that add up to, exactly?

Glad you asked.  “Data Diamond” is an album long on polish and surprisingly accessible in execution.  To listen to the first half of  “The Witch” is to hear two songs simultaneously, the one hard rock banger that lays all its cards out for easy viewing, and the second the ethereal synth wave lying underneath.  Kirk Witt’s vocals (which make it hard to not hear “Head Over Heels” in the subconscious, but it’s not Witt’s fault his voice sounds like that,) add another layer on top of the brew that makes “Data Diamond” an animal that defies classification.  This continues all the way through the expansive title track right at the finish.

Here's where the issues start to creep in.  If you’re going to be an experimental band, be experimental all the way to the limits.  Push every boundary, test every sound, combine every element that strikes even the barest fancy, and find a way to fit a handful that don’t.  “Data Diamond” has one critical flaw at its center, which is that Kirk Witt and comrade-in-arms Matt Vallarino employ the same basic gameplan on every song, plus or minus the level of guitar distortion.  

Make no mistake, it takes talent to arrange these pieces into anything more than a cacophonous mess, but at some point the repetition of the same effects devolves the impact, and leaves you with just a gimmick.

When listening to “Data Diamond,” sometime around the last third of the album, that realization dawns, and this is, perhaps coincidentally, about the same time that the album starts to overstay its welcome, which is doubly concerning for an album that runs just under forty minutes in total.  

Which is really a shame because there are individual moments here that were worthy of greater exploration.  There’s an outro to “Open the World” that’s novel and different when weighed against the bulk of the record, and more time spent in that space would have been to the album’s benefit.  Not to mention that the production itself is of high merit.  But the bright spots like that are mowed under by the persistent theme of the record, which is to stomp along with a leaden guitar and accent it with odd lyrical phrasing and throwback synth riffs.

“Data Diamond” ends up disappointing because it simply isn’t weird enough.  There’s something here to be certain, but it is too content to rest on a single laurel and torpedo some of the truly artistic potential that could have blossomed.