“Do you love this country? Are you willing to die for it?” So whipsers songwriter Jerry Chen, with a voice like the bastard child of Gordan Gano and Decemberists’ Colin Meloy and a mind like a one-night stand between Thomas Pynchon and Robert Smith. This brain-heavy odyssey of an album takes its own view of modern, crumbling society in an era of repression, fear, and liquid-free airports, for the most part narroly avoiding cliche and melodrama; but the clunky French dialogue of “August 13th” just shows where it triumphs and falters. When handling direct, gloomy rock with intelligence and style (“Self-Propagating Mechanisms of Religion”), Diaries is great. When lost in a swamp of pretension and high concept (“An Attemp At Qualificatoin”), it all gust falls apart.
- Emily Tartanella
November, 2006
The Big Takeover