Why splinter groups from splinter-groups? Why spin off spin-offs? Why make a spectacle of yourself? Why, indeed, Statistics? Desaparecidos co-songwriter Denver Dalley now finds himself at the reins of this solo project, just another in a long, unending line of hopeless supporting acts led by a sideman from a semi-popular indie band. These projects sometimes reap fantastic results, but judging from this debut outing, Dalley's future could hardly be bleaker.
To begin, Dalley possesses neither heart nor soul as a lead vocalist, and his milk-warm emotional outpouring of tiresome, overwrought subject matter could get lost in a crowd of two. That these are the best assets of Statistics is a sad fact, but that he spends half this album relying instead on flak-shot instrumentals is simply fatal. Of Leave Your Name's eleven songs, five are nebulous, inscrutable "experiments in sound," including the near five-minute closer "Circular Memories".
In a way, this could be seen as a positive trait, but the lack of sentiment in these ambling post-rock passages, which all boil over with bombastic riffage and gratuitous drum rolls, is every bit as insipid as Dalley's plaintive, weeping vocal outbursts. Perfunctory mood-setting stabs like "Chairman of the Bored" (nice one!) and "Accomplishment" at least confine themselves to runtimes of less than three minutes, but nonetheless taxi along on piano or acoustic meandering above linear backdrops of half-baked ambience.
"Sing a Song" opens with unsettling Oakenfold-bred resonance giving way to Jealous Sound jangle-pop-by-numbers, replete with predictable shifts in dynamics and antiseptic crescendos. Same goes for "Hours Seemed Like Days", which boasts the record's most obnoxious lyrics, opining how "claymation is gone and now it's all become CG" in an embarrassing tone of false nostalgia. Lamentably, +/- has already run the numbers on this hybridization of purebred-rock-to-shakedown-ambience, only with a touch of innovation-- and on a track like, "A Number, Not a Name", Dalley proves he's a far cry from Tamborello as well. Pigeonholing this record into a simple genre like "emo" or "post-rock" or "sadcore" is impossible, as its focus is far too splintered to qualify for any one in particular. I can, however, tell you what it's not: a record you haven't heard before.
