Religious people, especially Christians, used to be a gloomy bunch. Think about Jesus. Sure, he eventually triumphed over death, but the whole point of putting him on earth in the first place was to get him killed. Almost every one of his followers was martyred, and those following in their footsteps-- monks and priests-- would regularly pay rueful, onerous penance, and swear to never have sex in their lives. Someone sign me up!
Recently, though, religion has taken a different tack. In a quest for fresh converts, Christians have spruced up their image, emphasizing the happy, fun times over the heritage of suffering, all in an effort to "meet the young people where they're at." Unfortunately for them, my guess is that secular youth aren't all smiling. No, the under-30 crowd seem to be a bit more confused, upset and cynical; in a word, angstful. Engine Down knows it because they are, too. On Demure, the band evidences a keen empathy towards where the frowning youngsters are at, and it meets them there.
Singer Keeley Davis presides over Engine Down's congregation, chanting a brooding liturgy of angst. His solemnity is effective in one way-- Davis' voice may tend towards the Kermit side (throaty), but it is rich and expressive, convincingly communicating cynicism and sadness. Engine Down comes up a tad short on the songwriting end, though; if you've heard a chanted liturgy, you know this-- they may be hypnotic, but they certainly aren't melodic. In a similar way, Engine Down's vocals sound like moribund meditations. Besides being simple and slow to develop, the melodies are uniform: from song to song, Davis laments his subjects in more or less the same basic fashion, rarely departing more than one or two tones from where he started.
Fortunately, this weakness isn't fatal, and it may well be calculated. For as sad as a man like Brian Wilson may have been, he rarely sounded it. There's wisdom in that there proverb: want to sound melancholy? Do not follow the bouncing ball. Leave the bouncy, chipper melodies for the bouncy, chipper people. However-- and this is a substantial however-- if you're going to make an album with melodic uniformity, you'd better work it out with the instrumentation. That shit needs to be dead-on.
In this respect, Engine Down plays a strong hand. The instrumentation and orchestration on Demure are both equally impressive. Guitarist Jonathan Fuller and bassist Jason Andrew Wood play quite well together, especially when utilizing counterpoint, as on the title track, where Fuller fingers a rapid arpeggio while Wood walks out a minor-key pattern mimicking the drum rhythm. The drums, courtesy of a most unfortunately named white man, Cornbread Compton, are as dynamic as the melodies are stagnant. Opener "Songbird," for example, is defined by the unsettling drum beat. The propulsive "Taken In" gains its momentum from Compton's rolling, full-bodied tom and bass rhythm. Moreover, the music fits the mood of the vocals perfectly. The coarse, minor key guitars communicate the same emotions as Davis' lyrics. Likewise, the song structures retain a consistent tension and anxiety from odd rhythms and time signatures.
Demure is a consistent release, albeit a tad formulaic and lacking in overall dynamism. To fully meet the young people where they're at, the band would do well to play up their fondness for variety; shifting tempo, voracious intensity and building to crescendos all seem to be popular with the kids these days. True to its title, Demure lacks the confidence to tread all over the competition, but holds its own as a pretty nice effort.
