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“Let’s Go Extinct,” the third album from London prog-folkers Fanfarlo, is their attempt to make a “masterpiece” that will propel them to global success. It ambitiously covers universal themes of relationships, love and inter-connectivity. The band attempts to tie these themes together into a progressive concept album similar to Pink Floyd’s classic “Dark Side of the Moon” and even incorporates direct rip-offs like the ticking of the clock on “Time.” They try to take drastically different genres, like prog-folk and new wave, and force them into a cohesive mixture that just does not work as well as planned. Lead vocalist Simon Balthazar aspires to come across as intellectual and interesting as French poet Charles Baudelaire, who inspired the name of the band. Unfortunately for Balthazar and the rest of his band, their aspirations fall flat both sonically and in the meaning they wanted to create.
The allusions are far too obvious to show anything more than a fleeting, catchy, “artistic” feel. Some lines are not even understandable and it makes you wonder how the band got their ideas approved. “Should we kill it off / Cut out fast and deep? / When it feels so wrong, ridiculous and cheap” from the pretentiously titled “Myth of Myself (A Ruse to Exploit Our Weaknesses)” is one example of the nonsensical lyricism that spews from Balthazar’s mouth. It fails to reach the lyrical and sonic heights they so desire to achieve and instead leaves you hanging in a mixture of synths and ProTools. Balthazar’s voice is pleasant enough, but when you are trying to make something outstanding, you cannot just rip off your inspirations. Too many songs sound like they have been taken directly from the catalog of The Dirty Projectors or The Talking Heads. While Fanfarlo seems to have the skills to succeed in the music industry they just do not show enough real inspiration to make a record comparable to the previous legends.
The instrumentation on the album is a highlight. It is incredibly diverse and includes mandolins, violins, musical saws, clarinets and saxophones. Sadly, some of this diversity is lost in the production of the album, which overshadows almost everything. It is a tragedy when a band and label are so obsessed with making their record sound pristine that they lose all touch with their true musical roots. Instead of creating an artistically diverse album, they wash their sound over in production and it kills any form of momentum or soul this album could have.
The record is catchy and enjoyable enough in the same synthy, earworm way bands such as Foster the People and Passion Pit are. When Balthazar lets himself loose, as he did on “Landlocked,” the song becomes much more entertaining and you can see where their aspirations truly succeed. Songs such as “The Grey and the Gold” and the eponymous finale actually work in the artistic sense they are trying to achieve, but these moments are too far apart to truly call this album a success. “Let’s Go Extinct” has a lot of willpower but no soul to give itself any real strength. It may find decent chart success in both England and the U.S., but this is not the record that will propel Fanfarlo to global acclaim.
