The Folk Implosion Album Recommendations: "One Part Lullaby"

Album Recommendations: One Part Lullaby

The old five-point scale has been retired in favor of just rating stuff 1-10, which allows me a much more nuanced final rating. Still don't take it that seriously. Most of these come from my own collection, so the grades skew rather high. Your results may vary if you send me stuff to review.

Each album is given three Essential tracks, my personal favorites, regardless of how weird and inconsequential they are. The Quintessential pick is the one I think best represents the album as a whole, so you can try one song instead of a whole album of songs. Non-Essential picks range from merely disappointing to outright unlistenable.

The Folk Implosion

[#] One Part Lullaby (1999)

His soul's not the only thing on cruise control.

Reviewed July 18, 2024

Anyone who knows anything about Lou Barlow knows that the late 90s were not kind to him. Sebadoh was one of Sub Pop's shining stars until they weren't. The Folk Implosion got their top 40 hit in with "Natural One" and then imploded less than half a decade later. Ouchie. One Part Lullaby serves as foreshocks: not only is this album solely Lou's vocally (if John Davis truly sang on it, I've yet to be able to tell), but it's far more intentional, humorless, and dour than anything the duo had done previously. John exited stage left by 2003, leaving Lou to recruit alaska! as his backing band with an even more downcast "New" Folk Implosion record that spring. Does any of that mean One Part Lullaby is a bad album? Not necessarily—but it sure is overly long and overly serious and not very Folk Implosion-y.

Perhaps sensing that they should've followed the eerie collage blueprint of the Kids soundtrack on their own albums, One Part Lullaby is indietronica studiocraft through and through. Its best trait is its sonics, a nice mixture of drum machines and loops, guitars, even quirkier instruments like banjos and glockenspiels. It's no surprise the sole instrumental here, the boot camp blues of "Serge", is also one of its finest. It's got plenty of cool-sounding moments, like "E.Z. L.A."'s take on the "California Love" vocoder hook (hell, "E.Z. L.A." as a whole), the minor key rumbling guitar lines pulsing through opener "My Ritual", or the slinky, dungeon-inky "Kingdom of Lies", but the lack of vocal tradeoff and tempo variation and Lou's ceaseless, downright humorless navelgazing about relationships, emotions, and troubled upbringings for almost an hour straight really does send One Part Lullaby in circles. Where's a "Slap Me" when you need it?