Cloud Cult
Advice from the Happy Hippopotamus
Earthology/Baria

Songwriter Craig Minowa's outfit Cloud Cult has been described in the St. Paul Pioneer Press as a quest to "make a movement out of his fury." The band is four albums old, and the latest, 25 tracks and more than an hour in length, can be read most accurately as a forward-thinking next step. If the first three albums lent a bit more space to the particular targets of Minowa's personal sadness and political rage, Advice from the Happy Hippopotamus focuses on overcoming them. The album is optimistic, and the singer encourages the listener, and himself, to be optimistic, to move forward with hope, to, in an exhortation to a concert audience that opens one track, "show the people of the world that you are alive."

Minowa has said that a hippopotamus, who comes to him in his dreams, gives him fairly sage advice, including, presumably, celebrate life and make the best of one's situation. "The hippo inspires a lot of my music," Minowa told the Duluth News Tribune. "People probably think it's loony as heck, but the music is loony, so there you go." Well, yes, it is loony, but it works, not least of all because, despite the focus on the upbeat, the fury and despair remain present, below the surfaces of songs, and the conflict between the two makes for music of persuasive melody and momentum.

Advice from the Happy Hippopotamus is musically vast, incorporating overripe symphonics, ragged-edged guitar pop, bruising drum beats on loan from "When the Levee Breaks" (and employed to magnificent effect on a stand-out track, "Clip-Clop"), and cello and violin as sweetener. There is a welcome, and sunny, incorporation of a banjo on the sweet "Lucky Today," in which Minowa informs us that "I've got two hands on the sunshine, I've got one foot in the grave, I've got 25 cents in my wallet, and I'm feeling mighty lucky today." The music is inventive, and almost unbearably emotional in spots. "Clip-Clop" and "Training Wheels," paired aurally by a smash edit, are cathartic — on the first track, Minowa's reedy, quavering voice floods with defiance as he considers the future:

I've sailed through hurricanes with just a wooden plank and a smiley face And it took me somewhere that I don't know And I'll not be stranded here this time cause I've found escape is a state of mind And I'm going somewhere I don't know

"Training Wheels," by contrast, follows a spectral melody through the story of a child riding his bike without training wheels for the first time. (A chorus of attendant voices, coaxing and insistent, asks repeatedly, "How are you doing?") It is an exquisite melody outfitted with Pink Floyd-style electronic somnolence; hence, the song is disarmingly eerie and tranquil in the same breath, and the CD's fullest realization of the conflict of external optimism and below-the-surface anger and sadness. On this track, Cloud Cult discovers why Billie Holiday is so important.

Minowa's politics are environmental; he lives on a farm in Minnesota, where he works for the Organic Consumers Association, and he is an official advisor to the United Nations on environmental issues. Earthology Records, which he established, is billed as "the world's only environmental nonprofit record label." Their profits go to charity. The CDs are packaged with reused jewel cases, recycled cardboard, and nontoxic soy ink. The recording studio Minowa toils in is composed of "recycled and salvaged materials." The songwriter's political concerns are voiced quite easily at his concerts, which Cloud Cult describes as "Mini-Woodstocks."

In 2002, Minowa's 2-year-old son, Kaidin, died in the middle of the night, of unspecified causes. Minowa's marriage ended not long thereafter. This terrible loss is very much a part of previous Cloud Cult releases, and Kaidin is all over this album, too, but he exists in a manner similar to Minowa's environmental concerns. The CD is packaged with environmentally friendly care, but there is no song titled "Clear Skies Initiative Is Bullshit." Tracks reference training wheels coming off bikes, backpacks and bags of caramel corn, and wanting to start fresh and new "but my skin's still made of memories," but there is no song taking us through the specifics of Minowa's dark nights alone with thoughts of his loss (these nights are, quite rightly, personal).

Minowa's songs teem with references to death, rebirth and soldiering on against steep odds. An unidentified woman on what sounds like an answering machine speaks of seeing a light at the end of the tunnel. On the beguiling "Transistor Radio," a grandfather's voice comes up on the radio, though he "turned in his bones 20 years ago." On "We Made Up Your Mind for You," a chorus informs the listeners that they did just that, and the pessimist in our head has been banished, and we can be happy again. "That Man Jumped Out the Window" posits that "there's a fine line between falling and flying," and, in its airy folk-rock crescendos, suggests that the man who jumped out the window may have flown back in.

Advice from the Happy Hippopotamus is an honest assessment from Minowa of the contents of his heart, and his passion gives the songs real velocity. There is purpose in the music. If the album lacks for anything, it is surprise. Once Minowa establishes the musical identity of a song, he doesn't add much to it. Now and again, you get a surprise or two — the sudden appearance, for example, of a beefy guitar in the break of "Car Crash" adds a muscular element to the song's stark, dreamy construction. But, by and large, the songs all feel like great beginnings, and you begin to want for a middle and end somewhere. This isn't necessarily a bad thing; the band's ethos seems to favor continued growth and development. (Minowa continues to add members and instruments to the band, invites painters on stage with him while touring to paint along to the music, and has performance artists and dancers interacting with the audience. The presence of so many people on tour with him helps him feel less like "a tomato off the vine," and fuels him creatively.) Cloud Cult is already an accomplished outfit; to say that they're a level or two away from a breakthrough along the lines of White Blood Cells or Bee Thousand isn't a knock on them, really; it's optimism.

— Christopher Hickman (hickatz at mindspring dot com)