Farma: Farma

The San Francisco quintet Farma has released a debut that shows a band as ambitious as it is as capable as musicians. The six-song EP is full of lush harmonies and imaginative songs, with a topic range broad enough to include an imagined love story between Chairman Mao Tse-Tung and Marilyn Monroe (“Mao/Marilyn”) and the Japanese sex industry (“Tokyo Lucky Hole”). These stories of unrequited love and life’s misgivings are all neatly bathed in layered guitars and careful rhythms. However, for all of its meticulous writing and careful playing, Farma’s debut EP buckles under the weight of its ambition.

The songs on Farma’s eponymous debut are meticulously crafted and imaginative, as well as carefully performed, but the band’s careful nature and lofty ambitions to push the pop envelope work against each other. In its ambition to write complex pop songs, the band forces broad themes and fanciful stories into spaces where far simpler ideas would have fit much better. At other times the arrangements are drawn out to showcase solos or build a mood, but because of the careful restraint of the performances the songs never really arc. The result is an album that, although full of talent, is largely void of soul.

The rootsy, mid-tempo opener offers hope of what is to follow on the rest of the album. However, the following track, “Mao/Marilyn”, thoroughly frustrates, and doubts about the band’s abilities to fulfill its lofty goals begin to flow. The track is a lover’s lament from Chairman Mao to Ms. Marilyn Monroe. Mao’s want is told with a cartoonish sort of boyhood longing that makes it easy to imagine the Chairman staring out of his window imagining his love staring up at the same night sky. But the song’s storybook charm wears thin pretty quickly, and by the time Mao begins to mourn Monroe’s passing, his unrequited love and the song’s repetitive shuffle cause me to silently cheer her passing — without it I fear the song would have been nearly 10 minutes long.

The following track, “Jody Said”, is the album’s strongest. Light and spacious, the song cuts right to its theme, without the music sounding forced. Drums casually swing through the Velvet-Underground-esque refrain, “Jody says / there are no second chances.” The song is simple and eloquent, with quiet vocal harmonies that evoke A Ghost is Born-era Wilco (“Theologians”, specifically).

The fifth track, “Midnight Rider (or hallucinations outside of Fontana)”, smacks of the Doors at their most self indulgent, without the big payoff of Jim Morison freaking out at the end. The song drifts along, with a plodding bass line and psychedelic guitars that motor ahead at a lava lamp’s pace before slipping into silence and giving way to the final song of the EP. “Black Moon”, a song that could easily have been written in the late ’60s, is a sparse, acoustic ballad stripped down its essential elements. Much like “Jody Says”, “Black Moon” doesn’t shoulder the burden of Farma’s ambition, and is the better for it.

Farma’s debut is an open road invitation to join the band as it journeys to find itself inside songs that are as broad as Midwestern skies. But much like those skies the album often feels like there is no end in sight. The songs roll themselves from the expansive skies to the foothills of the Rockies, only to fall silent as they approach their mountainous peaks. However, for all of its faults, the self-titled debut shows a lot of promise in a young band full of capable musicians and inventive creativity.