Here's the elevator pitch for Dignan Porch: Did you like indie rock in the 1990s? Great, they do too. Enjoy. Because you can name the first 10 bands off the dome that fit into your idea of what "indie rock in the 90s" meant, and something on Nothing Bad Will Ever Happen will probably sound like each one of them. But they can't exactly be pegged as 90s revivalism, because that term implies not just worship, but a kind of evangelical zeal that Dignan Porch lack. You can argue how much they ever courted a traditional idea of "success," but it's absurd to say Pavement or Guided By Voices or Yo La Tengo ever lacked ambition or failed to convey their own personalities within their music. Dignan Porch don't have a grip on those things quite yet. So this feels like rock music that abides by ambient's goal of creating a respectful and effective alternative to silence. No matter how much care and craft went into it, you ultimately feel like its creators intentionally are trying to avoid being noticed.
Nothing Bad Will Ever Happen is technically the second record made by Dignan Porch, but the first in which "Dignan Porch" refers to a five-piece band rather than main singer-songwriter Joe Walsh. The production gets a significant upgrade from wooly fuzz to "scruffy," keyboardist Hayley Akins' vocals become a welcome counterpoint, and the songs are allowed to meander amiably. It's actually fascinating just how baseline Dignan Porch get here: Nothing Bad Will Ever Happen certainly doesn't sound expensive, but by no means is it lo-fi. It's hummable, but the melodic progressions most of these songs follow failproof them. You can make out some of Walsh's lyrical themes-- drugs, girls, general bummer-ness-- but rarely do they follow an emotional trajectory. Walsh's vocals in and of themselves are indicative of an everyman middle ground. He's occasionally obscured by the production, but not in a way that appears to be a conscious atmospheric choice as opposed to one determined by the record's budget.
But really, it just comes down to Dignan Porch writing songs that are no better or no worse than most of their peers. "Picking Up Dust" and "Darkness" are equally jaunty and scuffed-up in a manner that's expected of something on Woodsist, where they'd be undoubtedly overshadowed by Woods' idiosyncratic production of the same kind of material. The guitar leads on the sunburned "Pink Oil" recall maybe five different tracks from On Fire, but the song as a whole lacks a real sense of place or perspective. And of course, a UK band making predominantly American music on a hip indie label has to reckon with Yuck's pitch-perfect debut from last year doing this exact thing with stronger hooks, more distinctive lyrics, and musicality with far more body and resistance.
It'd be nice to know what moves Dignan Porch as artists as opposed to mere listeners, but they don't seem all that caught up in giving much of themselves. If Dignan Porch happen to find you as opposed to the other way around, it's a pretty easy record to make the best of. They're the opening band you actually kinda enjoyed even though you showed up too early by mistake, the album you half remember liking when it was playing in a friend's car.
