Ex Math Rocker’s Latest Doesn’t Add Up

San Francisco’s east-bay music scene is generally a hotbed of various talents. E-40, Rancid, Green Day, and Tower of Power to name just a few. However, the status quo doesn’t come to fruition in the case of Oakland’s Dylan Champagne. The once lead-singer/guitarist for hardcore outfit One Step Shift, Champagne tries to make the transition from math-rocker to folk-soloist with the release of his debut New Equation and painfully to the displeasure of music listeners aboard, his formula is missing a few key variables.

Dylan Champagne’s offering is an irksome experience of when musicians try to mimic industry trends. New Equation is a compilation of uneventfully systematic, sour melodies and shaky notes containing themes of hopelessness and despair that may make the album, as a whole, a self-fulfilling prophecy. The album is a discombobulated mix of oddly arranged tunes: some get louder when they should stay quiet, while others remain silenced in the mist of misplaced instrumentation as Champagne’s melodramatically monotone vocals carry very little weight throughout. The song ‘Junk Parts’ is the only ditty that seems to have any musical merit, delivering a consistent drum beat and harmonic guitar parts littered with descent lyrics, which will remind you (almost too much) of Modest Mouse. But the album loses steam and validity with ‘The Majestic’ due to its historically incorrect nature. The song talks about a love interest leaving on a “Jersey” bound train that we are told later on is a “Union Pacific” boxcar. Aesthetically this sounds grand … if Union Pacific hadn’t stopped their passenger train service in 1971, a service that never traveled further east than Chicago! Perhaps this is a bit hypercritical - if we were to judge the historical accuracy of artists we’d have little to listen. However, not paying attention to details like this are indicative of the album’s overall inconsistencies both musically and lyrically. In addition to the obvious follies, sometimes the use of a pretentious vocabulary can be confused for concise songwriting -buyers beware.

With all this naysay it has to be underlined that New Equation is not necessarily a ghastly album, but similar works have been executed with more precision. Dylan Champagne is not a terrible artist, but he is performing the difficult duty of genre hopping, at a time when a plethora of popular and more experienced acts are also jumping the shark. If you add those two components together it poses a new mathematical hypothesis, which produces a coefficient of hope. Perhaps Dylan Champagne will drop the remainder and carry the two before his next recording, giving us a finely tuned algorithm in his sophomore year?

John Niederkorn