Kristian Hoffman - Fop

By janetkjay on Dec 13, 2010 at 10:13am

Kristian Hoffman drew on his decades of experience in the music industry to produce Fop, a huge, sprawling album, strong of drum and guitar but embroidered in silk and velvet. With Fop Hoffman looks to his forebears (there's a little Pet Sounds and Sgt. Pepper in there) and takes seventeen tracks to explore his own musical time and the cohorts he's found there.

Hoffman's long and varied career started with a stint as a keyboardist in the Mumps, a New York punk band. He later wrote many of new wave legend Klaus Nomi's best known pop songs, including the inescapable "Total Eclipse;" toured as a member of the Kinks' Dave Davies' solo band; and worked in the music business as an illustrator, designing album covers for legendary punk band X and the famous "bendover girl" from the New York Dolls' debut LP.

With Fop, Hoffman reflects the glamor of the '70s and '80s with drama and wide-ranging imagination. That, and a lot of synth, power-pop, and occasionally a little funk. In interviews about the album, Hoffman has asserted that "more IS more." Make no mistake: this is a BIG album. Every bit of it is large: the number of tracks, the length, the width and breadth of lyrics and instrumentation, the decades of music it spans, the emotions it concerns itself with. Fop seems to grope - imperfectly, humanly - towards connection, towards optimism and consciousness. "What denouement is more utterly utter / than God in his final involuntary shudder," asks the opener "Something New Is Born," a track with sounds like it has a little Elvis Costello magic sprinkled in (it ends with the line "This harmonic thrust / That makes the change begin / the semen in the eye of God"). However expansive the music is - and hear you me, it's expansive - the lyrics are just as, if not more so, important. Hoffman is a poetic, expressive lyricist. His songs tell stories, intricate stories, but they also contain phrases like "my Hitchockian train," "dead liverpudlian wag," and the poignant "I'd say you stole my thunder, but it never was mine."

What problems the album has stem from a lack of restraint: there's a lot of heart in these songs, but it can sometimes be hard to see through the flourishes and many layers. The album's length can be a negative too: there's so much music, so much feeling, and so many songs that they blur together, and unfortunately the second half of the record is stronger. However, Fop is an epic album by an accomplished artist who has obviously put his heart into it, and it will speak to people.