Black Before Red - Belgrave to Kings Circle

General Ratings:

Rating: 7
Breadth of Appeal: 6
Consistency of Quality: 6

RIYL: The Shins, Beulah, The Sea and Cake

Further Listening: Blind Pilot, Elf Power, Earlimart

Place of Origin: Austin, TX

Sound/Instrument List: Electric and Acoustic Guitars, Bass, Piano, Synths, Drums, Multitracked Vocals, Trumpet, Slide Guitar, Handclaps, Shaker, Wood Block, Harmonica

Mood Tones: Western, not country. The Route 66 road trip.

Song Highlights: Underneath Gold, Matagorda, Halliberlin Petroleum

Favorite Lyrics:

“There’s girls here in summer clothes.” (from "Underneath Gold")

“Pay no mind at all, /
put your faith in common things: /
security halls, antique malls, /
and the skirt that makes you thin.” (from "Spilt Milk Mistake")

“We are just what you think we are. /
We are what you think we are.” (from "Teenage America")

Further Thoughts:

There was a while there where great indie bands seemed to spring, fully formed, from Zeus’s head. The Arcade Fire’s Funeral, Broken Social Scene’s You Forgot It In People, Wolf Parade’s Apologies to the Queen Mary, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s S/T (Zeus’s head = Canada, apparently): here were stunningly mature albums from young bands who had already mastered a certain niche in the sonic terrain (in a more mainstream mold, think Interpol’s Turn on the Bright Lights and The Strokes’ Is This It?). In fact, many of these bands had earlier efforts, EPs and self-released debuts and the such, but it was easier to pretend that these missteps didn’t exist. And so we, or at least I, have come to expect near-perfection from new bands: give me Reservoir right off the bat, or keep it in the garage until you can.

This is completely unreasonable, of course, and it’s also robbed us (that is, me) of the pleasure of tracking the promise of up and comers. No one knew who the Arcade Fire were, then overnight everyone did, and they were anointed saviors of rock ‘n roll. And so the career arc available to the above sort of bands is still unclear. All of them put out disappointing sophomore efforts, and we’re still waiting to see if they can huddle up and find direction with their thirds. The coherence of a Funeral or Your Forgot It In People is impossible to follow. You can’t just put out a sequel, because one Funeral is a masterpiece, but two in a row reveals you to be a one-trick pony. So these bands put out second albums where it’s impossible not to imagine them sitting down and saying: well, let’s write a Springsteen song here and a Pavement song there, a Do-Wop number for this one, then The Cars, and rip off Stereolab for that one.* Now it’s bands’ second albums that wear their influences on their sleeves. The sensibility that had come together perfectly on their debuts gets fractured as they push their sound through a number of different holes in an attempt at progress.

Remember when bands had normal career arcs? Take Wilco, say, or The National: a shitty first album that’s a victim of the times (*cough* alt-country *cough*), an uneven second where things start to come together, a grower of a third that puts the world on notice, and then, only then, four albums in, a perfect album (Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Boxer). (Then you kick Jay Bennett out and start putting out uninteresting classic rock wankery or you let Sufjan Stevens unofficially join your band and who knows?). When you don’t hit your stride until your third or fourth album, you might actually be a mature band instead of simply sounding like one. And so you can weather the critical nonsense, some bad reviews, some Radiohead comparisons, and you’ve got a deep enough bag of tricks and sounds and songs to know how to move forward with staying power.

Black Before Red are a band that could find that arc, I think. Listening to their debut over the last few months, it strikes me as a bit of an emotional cypher: When I’m depressed it sounds depressing, when I’m happy it sounds happy. Really all that’s going on is that it’s a more traditionally assembled album. They don’t have a singular, niche-filling sound--they have range and probably less than a perfect idea of what they’re after. So on one listen the peppy “Halliberlin Petroleum” and “Teenage America” stand out (I guarantee I could pass off the former as a Shins’ b-side on unsuspecting tourists), on another the brooding bassline of “Underneath Gold” and piano outro of “Matagorda.” It’s not a great album, but it’s a good one, and it’s easy to see the promise of future albums and a fuller development to come. (I’d put it between Being There and Summerteeth, Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers and Alligator in the above matrix.) Listening to it isn’t an immediate, revelatory, religious experience, but thank god. I need less albums that inspire a month of discipleship of me and more that can sit on the stereo for a solid year, accompanying dinner or morning coffee once or twice a week without exhausting themselves. Which is perhaps to say that this album is a grower, but also that I think it might be a stayer which finds a spot in the rotation.

The Downside:

For a poppy album, the hooks--and melodies generally--aren’t quite strong enough here. There are also a few duds in the middle of the album which lessen its momentum.

*Bonus Points: name the five exact songs I'm thinking of, all from bands in the first paragraph.