On the opening track of this Atlanta quintet's first full-length, the acidic washes of the Verve's less commercial songs meld with the whiney inflections of, say, Placebo's Brian Molko. The guitars eventually move toward the falsely epic Edge of reason (the lick is virtually lifted from U2's "New Year's Day") before mechanical strums change tack again, pulling the potential of all this inattentive variety into a heap of head-tossing joy, more hapless crux of overwritten Dandy Warhol song than prologue track of festival-gracing rock newcomer. Andy Hull, the singer, lends the dullest songs an attitude; sometimes that attitude is simply warmth, other times it's an ornery kind of emotional outpouring. But when the better songs succeed, they leave the singer in the dust, his vocal twists and turns a cacophony among the seamless, inventive components of guitar, keyboard, drum, and bass, particularly noticeable on "Now That You're Home".
Much of the album has a road-bound, breezy, wistful tone, well-produced on the band's own label by Dan Hannon. On "I Can Barely Breathe", the sea-like gurgles of the guitar meld with car window-gazing plucks, and the torrid yelps of the chorus take us back to another moment of the 1990s, the almost furry thickness of guitars in songs by bands like Weezer and Toadies. The song's devolution is welcome; it's an impenetrably sad loop of descending chords mimicked in every instrument, and while there's nothing complex or entirely innovative about it, it's moving all the same.
The effect is similar to that of the candid lyrics of "Sleeper 1972", which recounts the most biological and vapid parts of death and their repercussions on the living. Accompanied only by an organ, Hull's voice takes on a sweet, hushed quality, and on this track the comparison to Ben Gibbard starts to make sense. Who else is able to discuss the morbid with such sugar in his voice?
The subjects here, musically grungy and convincingly adolescent, are, verbally speaking, full of references to childhood, family, relationships, desire, and sympathy. In "I Can Feel Your Pain", Hull sings into the microphone like it's a voicemail we're not really supposed to hear. But we become stand-ins for a distant addressee who might have never heard the message. While this personal bit of memorabilia, acoustic and nicely undercooked, is lovely, like many of the other tracks, it achieves this via atmosphere, with nebulous ideas rather than a riveting melody or story. And "Pain" is so different from the rest that it feels like a mere interlude. By contrast, the vocal synths on "Where Have You Been" help make the song sound majestic, so perhaps it's commendable that Hull can direct songs that are both miniscule and mountainous in volume, and can achieve the same emotive weight in either case.
