Face to Face
Standards and Practices
[Vagrant]
Rating: 2.5
I wonder how Trevor Keith felt when he committed his pipes to the lines, "What
could a businessman ever want more/ Than to have us sucking in his store?/ We
owe you nothing/ You have no control/ You are not what you own." The Face to
Face frontman dives into Fugazi's rant, "Merchandise," without even a slight
trace of irony. Does Keith recall his brief stint of sucking The Man's ass
when he and his Faces were signed to A&M;? Or, does he sleep better, now that
he's back on an indie, doing his penance by covering a band with far more
anti-corporate credibility than his own?
Though I question his motives, ultimately, I just don't care. I'll admit,
I've even been wooed by a few Face to Face tracks in my day; the summer of
2000 single "Disappointed" was the deepest and darkest of my guilty pleasures.
Even so, I'm being generous when I say that Face to Face succeed in providing
ear candy for the future hard-of-hearing. What this boils down to for a
sometimes-cranky music reviewer on a more-than-surly website is that Face to
Face have all the makings of proverbial whipping boys. And, if the band is
an easy target, a covers record by that band is even easier.
That said, Standards and Practices is the epitome of the pointless
record. At its best, it's innocuous, with a straight-ahead approach to the
benchmarks of punk and new wave that influenced the band. Face to Face's
treatment of songs like Jawbreaker's "Chesterfield King," Sugar's "Helpless,"
and the Psychedelic Furs' "Heaven" is, in a word, uncanny. Surprisingly, the
pop-punk aesthetic is toned down on the latter two; instead of going for the
obvious powerful pump-ups, they take the moderately obvious cookie-cutter
approach. But if Standards and Practices is to be commended for
anything, it's that it doesn't completely massacre the Pogues' "Sunny Side of
the Street."
The record turns infuriating, though, when Face to Face alter the originals.
In most cases, for a cover to be a successful, slight tension should exist
between the original and the band's revamp; its source should at least be
respected on some level. But Face to Face gnawed off far more than they
could possibly ever chew with a few of these tracks, most notably the
aforementioned "Merchandise" and their abhorrent cover of the Jam's "That's
Entertainment."
Muddled political implications aside, "Merchandise," Face to Face-style, just
isn't musically sound. The original successfully skirted infectiousness with
its slightly off-kilter, and vaguely inaccessible melody and execution. Face
to Face are quite clearly no Fugazi, and end up injecting the track with a
dose of unnecessary poppiness. "That's Entertainment" starts off faithful to
the original's stripped-down, acoustic feel, but turns grandiose when these
guys introduce drums and a faster tempo to the dynamic. Here, the band uses
their pop-punk persuasion as a crutch to get them through a song that requires
more than they can pull off.
Most mysterious is why the hell Face to Face ever decided to make such a
record in the first place. It reportedly took them a week to record, though
it's hard to believe that they spent any more time on it than the 32-minute
running length. Maybe the guys were going for a one-two punch of hitting the
fans with a few classic tracks while delivering a "new" record. Maybe each
member had a burning desire to (deficiently) pay homage to his heroes. Maybe
they're just greedy. Regardless, Standards and Practices is a messy
assemblage of tunes best left untouched by three-chorders.
-Richard M. Juzwiak