Fairmont - Wait & Hope Review
by Patrick Muldowney
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The music world is comprised of local bands, national bands, local bands that should be national, and national bands that should be local. Fairmont is the last type of band considering that every effort is being made (see tour) to go national. Wait & Hope would be a respectable hometown release, and Fairmont would be an acceptable band to stumble upon while visiting a local rock club, but anything beyond that is hardly worth consideration at this point.
Fairmont, a 3-piece from NJ, brings rock in its most basic form. While refusing to challenge any boundaries musically, Wait & Hope is a series of muted and distorted power chords with acoustic open chords interspersed, root-based bass lines with occasional fill, and up-tempo 4/4 drumming. This blue-collar, hard hat approach is predictably coupled with lyrics about relationships and the truths, heartbreaks, and exits created by them. This prognosis cannot be clearer during "yearbook", a song about how an old flame has "faded like the photographs" from yesteryear. As a writer, the easiest subject is the possible ending of a troubled relationship and running away, but listening to someone "continue to whine" ("lack of luster") in a way that is neither enlightening nor original fails to be even therapeutic, which is the reason we listeners endure and enjoy the same damn song from a million bands using the slightest of variations.
A quarter century ago, I was blown away by the sounds of The Plimsouls as I watched Valley Girl and tried to get Nicholas Cage to quit his diatribe about music having soul so I could hear them a bit better. In Wait & Hope, The Plimsoul attempt is made, but it is an attempt inundated with the mediocrity that 25 years of other bands have rendered soulless, blowing to pieces any argument Randy (Cage's character) would dare make for Fairmont. For Wait & Hope, the one saving grace is the movie does end, and once the act is done, "at the end of the movie" gives listeners something to ponder. There is something endearing and disturbing about this track, which proposes killing pets, selling pets, buying a fast car, pulling a Bonnie & Clyde, and driving "all night 'til morning light, it burns our eyes." The light-hearted and hopeful approach of this song speaks truthfully of the spirit, and often dark humor, that keeps many couples sane. Possibly, this even gives cause to Wait & Hope that some day Fairmont will become the band we strain to hear in the background of our favorite movie.
Tracks added to iPod: since day one i've been plotting your death, at the end of the movie
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Fairmont - Wait & Hope
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