Since they started in the early 2000s, Sic Alps' music has made its way into the world via a host of formats (7", cassette, LP) and labels (Siltbreeze, Slumberland, and Woodsist), but however it arrived, you could always count on one thing: It would be damaged. Songwriter Mike Donovan and drummer Matt Hartman sought an improbable union of pop sweetness and sonic hate, blasting Kinks riffs through Pussy Galore's shredded speaker cabinets.
But if you're the type who comes to Sic Alps looking to get your hair blown back, the opening notes of the group's self-titled fourth album (fifth, if you count the compilation A Long Way Round to a Shortcut) will be a bit discombobulating. The record begins not with the death rattle of a battered thrift-store amplifier, but the harmonious tones of a hired string section. It's a soft but sinister set of songs-- the Bay Area's answer to the Velvet Underground's self-titled record. Where Sic Alps were once wasted and wobbly, they are now stoned and serene.
However messy the old Sic Alps sounded, they worked hard on it. Donovan would track his vocals and guitar alone in a single take, after which Hartman would step in to help graft on scuzz and grunge one 8-track layer at a time until things sounded right (or wrong in the right way). Napa Asylum, the group's third LP, was a culmination of this approach-- a grand Zen Arcade-style throw-it-all-in-the-pile double album that pinballed between zonked-babbling, free-form noise collages, and a few worthy garage-rock nuggets. In terms of sheer sprawling weirdness, it would have been hard to top.
Sic Alps did try, though. Shortly after that record's release, the band booked some time with San Francisco studio mainstay Eric Bauer to record some follow-up material. But in the spring of 2011, Hartman abruptly parted ways with the band. Those songs-- versions of which saw release throughout the following year on a series of 7" singles-- had a little bit of extra breathing room, but kept the fuzz cranked. By the time Sic Alps went to record another full length, they had the grit out of their system.
Sic Alps, also recorded with Bauer, isn't the band's first encounter with a professional studio, but it's certainly the most professional-sounding set of songs that they've ever assembled in one. For the first time ever, it sounds like the rhythm section was recorded in the same room at the same time. Where Donovan once came off like the Mission's most sinister hippy, on Sic Alps he's affected a more amiable persona: the Malkmus-style gentleman slacker. After wafting in on a cloud of drone and hiss, "Polka Vat" congeals into a relaxed-fit groove worthy of Wowee Zowee-era Pavement. "Moviehead" perfectly pairs a twanging Creedence-style riff with lyrics that drop references to "shred-dogs" and bengaline silk. There's still a little bit of scuzz, but it's been pushed to the background, leaving Donovan alone in center frame. But as a lyricist, he's at his best on Sic Alps, sinking bizzaro couplets left and right. On "Rock Races", he sounds, for the first time ever, optimistic. "Let's knock every wall down for love," he sings. And when Donovan's words trail off into lazy la-la-las, the string section picks up the slack. Sic Alps rarely reach for a grand gesture, but here they skirt into sublimely cinematic territory.
The pro studio production hasn't reduced the essential strangeness of Sic Alps' music, though. Rather, the transition from lo-fi auteur to visionary singer-songwriter is Drag City's standby narrative-- the path that produced some of the label's most resonant artists, from Will Oldham to Bill Callahan to David Berman. Scrubbing up doesn't always mean selling out.
