Miniature Portraits by Five Style (Review)

A lot of albums demand patience from the listener because they explore unknown, bizarre concepts; like a John Locke treatise, the music is so thick that it requires patience and forbearance to make it through to its heart. It’s an academic patience, a patience of sitting down and studying, of dissecting an album to see how all of those fascinating, beautiful sounds work together.

Five Style’s Miniature Portraits requires a different sort of patience, patience akin to that of trying to settle down a hyperactive 5 year old who just downed a whole carton of Super Fudge Double Chunk ice cream. I’ve read reviews lumping Five Style in with Tortoise. And while the bands share some common post-rock sounds, the executions are totally different. It’s almost as if Five Style just showed up in the studio one day, pressed “Record,” and proceeded to jam, throwing out this melody and that rhythm, weeding out the elements that didn’t work, and calling it good. In contrast, Tortoise seems to plan out their music with a slide rule and pocket calculator, ensuring that each rhythm, note, and melody appears when and where it should, lasts as long it needs to, and that’s it.

For Five Style, the musical hyperactivity makes for an interesting, albeit exhausting listen. There are times when you just have to wonder where the band was trying to go with a certain sound or musical segment. “Mythical Numbers” sounds like Don Caballero jamming with a mariachi band that can’t decide what tune to play, so they play them all. “Father Time” has a decidedly island flavor to it, mixed in with a ragtime piano that sounds like the band’s cat took a walk across the ivories during the recording session. “Hit The Decks” sounds like a reggae jam from the afterlife and “Pet The Cow” starts off with a bluesy feel feel before descending into some good old-fashioned blaxploitation funk.

While the looseness and “off the cuff”-ness of the album can be fun to listen to, there are time where you just want to grab the band by the scruff of the neck, make them sit down, and slowly tell you where they’re going. At many times in the album, the climax of the song can be barely seen, like something beautiful just on the horizon. You knows it’s there, you want to see more of it, but you just can’t figure out where the path is going to lead you, or if it’s even going to take you there at all. It’s like trying to follow a 5 year old around after they saw that Pokémon movie for the first time, like trying to make sense of what he’s saying as he tries to name each and every single one of those disgustingly cute creatures at once.