Neither innovative nor natural
Hard rock music sometimes tricks itself into thinking that very boring statements, repeated passionately, are meaningful. And, because Favez's singer sounds like the guy from Hot Water Music, I really wanted to like Favez, but I don't, because it is a lot too hard rock and not enough punk-clever. This album mostly bored me despite some of the graceful sonic qualities to their lyrics - they manage to find rhymes in words that aren't brutally obvious, but the stories they tell are repetitive and cliched. ‘The Goodbye Song’ references itself so much that if you removed every instance of the line "like a goodbye song that goes on and on" from the piece, it would go from being 7 minutes and 54 seconds long, to something like 4 minutes. Yeesh.
But that's perhaps the point. This album was recorded in Switzerland, and Favez has been touring the world for the last ten years. Their English is designed to be comprehensible to people who aren't native English speakers. I sound bigoted when I write that, but it's true. For the same reasons, most English music listeners, when asked if they like French music, will say "sure, rien, je ne regrette rien", because it's a simple, understandable and highly translatable statement.
John Berger wrote that the 20th Century is the first century during which poetry became truly translatable, and not just translatable, but necessarily translatable because the subjects and issues being expressed could not be trapped by something so transient as a language or a border. Favez's music feels like it's been translated through a few too many languages, and has somehow missed the critical thing (whatever that may be) that makes an album magic. Something is lost in translation. A pun like "Favez puts the boring in hard rock", for example, makes sense in English (even if it's a shit joke), but is incomprehensible when translated. Or maybe I'm just trying to find a complicated way to say I don't like this album because the lyrics and music are neither innovative nor natural sounding. An album recorded in Switzerland should experiment with something private and Swiss and, dare I say, important enough to translate.