313

Phideaux with singer/songwriter qualities

Phideaux has produced 6 albums within four years, all with different characteristics. This one is mainly Prog Folk and Rock/Pop influenced. Therefore '313' is not consisting of typical Prog Rock material. It rather sounds just like a singer/songwriter album. Some songs remember me at Matt Johnson (THE THE) very much. Retro back into the 60s/70s - no track is longer than six minutes. Very melancholic in some cases as one can expect. Some sources say the album is titled in this way because the recordings of this project initially begun on 3/13/04.

The best songs are at the beginning and the production gets weaker in the second half. I don't want to describe every piece of music but to emphasize some more important songs. Have You Hugged Your Robot? is a retro pop song with more tempo and some vocoder modified vocals. A Storm Of Cats - very sensitive with a nice melody and excellent piano playing. And Never Gonna Go is another ballad and the most proggish song IMO because of a heavy mellotron use.

This album is a matter of taste of course. So I'm not really excited but I have to confess it's a good effort with some careful detail work.

The last two albums from Phideaux were rather impressive and sophisticated, both reaching the four stars rating in my scale of values.

For this occasion, Phideaux decided to put an album together in ONE single day (on March 13. 2004, hence the title). Did he want to appear in the Guinness book of records? I have to say that this approach doesn't really reach the level of its glorious predecessors.

After some sort of a Hammill opening song, the mood is getting heavier and more "robotic". "Have You Hugged Your Robot" starts with the riff of "In the Hall Of The Mountain King" from ELO and features distorted and electronic vocals to meet the robot's standards. Press next.

Most songs are on the short edge and don't provide lots of emotion. It is just a collection of average numbers which are flowing nicely into one another as if this was a concept album, but that's it. Here and there, some better songs do appear ("Never Gonna Be") but the global folkish feeling combined with electroinc ones are not the ones I was expecting from a Phideaux album at this time of his career.

This album is a major disappointment as far as I'm concerned. These "computerized" vocals sound pretty bad and the music is not much better I'm afraid ("Pyramid"). A boring feeling emanates from this work.

My favourite song is by far the upbeat and catchy "Sick Of Me". Some light in this ocean of darkness. But the experimental "Cats 2 Space" brings us back into the most miserable mood.

It is strange how Phideaux constructed some of his albums. Starting the composition of songs and then leave them unfinished, then coming back to them a year or two later to finally release an album. The same technique was used for the excellent "Chupacabras". But this "313" is dramatically lacking the grandeur and beauty of this beautiful album.

I guess that you can tell about the content just watching at the cover. My advice is just to avoid this album and concentrate on his two prior albums ("Ghost Story" and "Chupacabras").

Two stars.

Cats, robots, monkeys and tigers.

I am enthousiast about this album, really. 313 is at first a blend of this and that; mainly tiny songs that have no connections between them. But disliiking the album because of it's lack of 'progressive concept' is not listening with your ears correctly.

313 has the most potential in melodies of all Phideaux' albums. Why? Every song is so c-a-r-e-f-u-l-l-y crafted, they're just not stretched into an epic. Most of the songs have this Doomsday Afternoon quality and if you exploit them a bit, they would become epics easily.

I'd say 90% of this album is delightful, especially the robot song, the one about cats, Sick of Me and the track Never Gonna Go. The latter is extremely impressive, having such strengh and grandeur in only 3 minutes, it's majestic!

313 smashes into smithereens albums build on the same patron (later Pink Floyd for instance).

I discovered something great, and spread the word in all the land.

Phideaux recorded this album in a single day - and that day was a March 13th, lending this album its name.

I understand the appeal of trying to prove that one can produce something very quickly, I've done so myself, but as should be obvious to any, even those who have never tried to produce something quickly, the work can easily suffer. There is less time for revision, to understand what is necessary and what is not, etc.

I think Phideaux knew this going in to the project and had no intention of creating a masterpiece, merely to come up with some good songs and put them on an album. And in that sense, this album succeeds. The lyrics are not quite up to the quality level of Phideaux's other albums, some of them being downright cheesy (Have You Hugged Your Robot and Run Singing Tiger come to mind). But this album also reveals how effortlessly the band can come up with a great melody and theme and build a song around it.

The quality of songs varies greatly, with the album being very front heavy - the best tracks including Have You Hugged Your Robot (it's cheesy but it sure is fun, and the robot voice-effects give it a bit of a humurous edge) and Never Gonna Go (which has a great rocking feel to it and the most impressive vocals on the album).

Unfortunately, I feel like by the time Orangutan rolls around, the band was running out of steam, and they never reach any real high heights from that point on. Some songs are just boring - Run Singing Tiger does absolutely nothing for me.

If you are a fan of Phideaux's music, then more good songs by him can't be a bad thing, and those exist on this album. But it is too uneven and not quite as polished as his other works, and so I hardly recommend this as a starting point for those curious about this prolific project.

It's March 13th, 2011, and so I thought I'd be super incredibly clever by offering a review of Phideaux's 313, which was (so I have read), composed and recorded in one day, March 13th, 2004, and then released exactly two years later, on March 13th, 2006. The timing of this recording instills in it a Chupacabras-light vibe, as the sound is comparable, but the compositions are much less involved, seemingly hearkening back to the 1960s, which is to say, keeping the material buoyant and entertaining, but throwing in a sociopolitical/environmental message or two. Many of the chord progressions are between the albums are quite similar. If one takes pleasure in the music ELO (ELeaux?) or Toto (Toteaux?), I would recommend this. It's no secret that there are far superior albums from Phideaux, but 313 is by no means a bad one!

"Railyard" It is interesting to me that the first track of an album that was supposedly more or less recorded in one day sounds like quintessential Phideaux. With the recognizable piano style, the distinct vocals, and the otherwise moderate instrumentation, 313's opener is quite prototypical of Phideaux's overall work.

"Have You Hugged Your Robot?" The second track begins with a rock rendition of "In the Hall of the Mountain King" from Edvard Grieg's score for Peer Gynt. Otherwise, it is fairly catchy but simplistic rock tune with cute Vocoder "robotic" vocals.

"A Storm of Cats" Following in line with the first track, "A Storm of Cats" uses a moderate tempo and similar sounds from "Railyard."

"Never Gonna Go" I enjoy this song, especially because of the use of strings and the pleasant vocal melody.

"Pyramid" A synthesizer lead over Toto-like piano gives way to a strange yet strangely enjoyable vocal performance (due in equal measure to the melody as the effects used).

"There's Only One of You" Light piano and hushed vocals provide the backbone for this track. It reminds me of Dave Mason's "Headkeeper."

"Orangutan" As a low-key dirge bemoaning the extinction of primates (and by extension, I suppose, humans), I'm not sure that I can say I really like the song, but I can say this slow lament was one of the songs that stood out the first time I heard the album (not really sure why).

"Sick of Me" Once again, this could have been a leftover track from Chupacabras; it contains good vocal interplay and a sitar tone that distances an otherwise similar piece from the rest of this album. The robotic vocals make a reappearance over an intriguing chord progression.

"In Search of Bitter Ore" A muffled, subdued tune, this simplistic track is one of the more forgettable ones, hovering over two chords most of the time.

"Body to Space" Soft pianos and a lonely, frail voice begin one of the quietest pieces on the album. Electric piano, synthetic bass and strings, whistling synthesizer, celestial singing, and acoustic guitar fuse psychedelic and folk music in a pleasing, ethereal way.

"Watching Machine" Right here is a clear, unashamed revisiting of the psych-pop of the 1960s, even going so far as to use a thin, fuzzy lead guitar and a tackily retro keyboard tone.

"Run Singing Tiger" After a subdued, female-led introduction, this piece keeps in line with the 1960s pop vibe- upbeat and fun.

"Benediction" The calmest track on the album, featuring mere piano and tranquilly dreary singing, is, I think, a strange way to conclude an otherwise bubbly album, but maybe the implicit message here is that no matter how much fun we have, there will always be serious issues to deal with. The enigmatic lyrics (organized as a trio of couplets), ends with a sobering yet hopeful thought: "We cheat the death that night will bring by everyday awakening."

Knocked out for a lark during the process of recording Chupacabras, 313 is infamous for being the Phideaux album the band composed and recorded in the space of a day. Although it was subjected to a fair amount of post-production afterwards to get it ready for release, the album is still rather defined by the limitations of its recording process - the songs focus on the shorter side of Phideaux' compositions, and there's no real overarching theme to them except for a tendency towards more whimsical numbers.

Still, there's a certain charm to the piece; although produced via a very different process, it reminds me a lot of Porcupine Tree's On the Sunday of Life - there's the same psychedelic throwback air to it, plus a jauntiness which arises from the artists not taking the album quite as seriously as some of their weightier works. Though it doesn't hit the top tier of Phideaux albums - really, it would be rather incredible if it did - I think it's a strong addition to their discography.