Fabulous Diamonds – Commercial Music (2012)

...Return To The Sun Of Nothing...

Fabulous Diamonds have lost their innocence. Where their first album, let’s call it 7 Songs, was a mere extension of the elementary nonchalance of their earlier EP –drummer and vocalist Nisa Venerosa’s caustic observations offered up in lucid fidelity over a clumsy convergence of drums, synths and saxophone –the second, Fabulous Diamonds II, was more abstracted. Representative of the legendarily combative relationship between Venerosa and band mate Jarrod Zlatic, the tension of that album’s unrelenting forward-thrust was most succinctly prefaced by a pissed-off Venerosa reproaching Zlatic for counting time too soon on record. That volatility, whether it be between band members, their divergent stylistic preferences or with their chosen instruments, is an energy Fabulous Diamonds thrives on. So what happens when that energy fades?


Always keeping their audience guessing, Fabulous Diamonds instills it with a heightened sense of confused unknowingness from the outset. Seemingly freeform though fully-composed pieces generate an overpowering sense of evasive cynicism, as slow-burning album opener ‘Inverted Vamp’ casually churns out a feeling of mundane desperation, while closer ‘Downhill’ works itself into a final fit of anxiety over a 10-minute stretch. Meanwhile, synth samples linger atop a chasm of manipulated sounds and echoes through a half-arsed duet in ‘Lothario’, while unease wavers over the delayed drumming of ‘John Song’. That track’s shrouded lyrics, now captured, reveal the truly brilliant pop inversion Commercial Music is meant to be; Venerosa and Zlatic howling, “John can’t dance no more, he’s doing ‘the face on the floor’,” as if this were the drug binger’s ‘Macarena’, Fabulous Diamonds-style.