Fernando: Enter to Exit

On listening to Enter to Exit, the latest album by Portland-via-Argentina singer-songwriter Fernando Viciconte, my first thought was, “man, this guy must really like Elliott Smith.” Not only is there the coincidence of the two artists’ shared musical homebase, but all of the usual Smith hallmarks are present and accounted for: soft, plaintive vocals, lush Beatlesesque arrangements, etc. The second track, “One Trick Pony,” is even about heroin, with decidedly Smithian lyrics such as “I’d like to see what it’s like / when the needle meets the spike.” But as easy as it would be to just rubber stamp “File Under XO” on this review and move on with my life, the fact is, Enter to Exit is just too good an album to deserve that kind of a write-off.

For one thing, Viciconte has been doing this shit for at least as long as Elliott had – his debut album Season in Hell came out in 1996, just two years after Smith’s Roman Candle, and like Smith, he did time in a harder rock band before branching into hushed pop territory, in his case as frontman for the Los Angeles group Monkey Paw. More to the point, Fernando’s musical territory is both broader and richer than most indie songwriters could even hope to achieve; aside from the Smith-alikes “Pony” and opener “Howard Hughes,” Enter to Exit also features trumpet-laden torch balladry (“Mariana”), manic music-hall pop (“The Reluctant Deity”), and – probably best of all – an absolute dead-ringer for ‘67-era Lennon called “From Now On.” And those are but a few examples.

Granted, not everything works – or at least not quite as well as in the aforementioned examples. “From Now On” is pretty solidly positioned as the “climax” of this record; the following four tracks, from the alt-country weeper “The Devil’s in the Sky” to the mournful (and occasionally monotonous) closer “Waiting,” take a little more work to unpack. But then, if the best criticism I can come up with is that Fernando has delivered an album one third of which isn’t as immediately lovable as the rest, then I should think he’s done a pretty decent job. Give Enter to Exit a spin, and I think you’ll agree.

- Zach Hoskins

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