On the casino floor at Caesar's Palace, carefully positioned to catch spillover from the adjacent Colosseum Theatre, is a gift shop devoted to a unique and singular brand: the Celine Dion Boutique. Now, I'm not so oblivious as to have missed the luminance of Ms. Dion's starpower, but as a marketable icon, Dion seems a bit hollow, and buying a $250 tracksuit with her name emblazoned on it seems a little like buying merchandise celebrating water or air. This is, after all, a performer whose big-budget Vegas revue features a Cirque du Soleil knockoff troupe to compensate for her shortage of stage presence.
Rainer Maria are far from having a replica historical amphitheater built for their performances, never mind the attached gift shop, but over the course of their five-album career their sound has traveled a path toward the kind of big-voice/big-message concept that would pack 'em in at an indie casino (Cosloy's Palace?). Once upon a time, the trio rode the second or third wave of emo, with Kyle Fischer and Caithlin De Marrais hurling raw harmonies at each other like Fleetwood Mac cum Fugazi. But after mastering that dynamic on the first song of their first full-length ("Tinfoil") the band has refocused their vocal spotlight to train solely on De Marrais.
In a technical sense, De Marrais' pipes are powerful enough to carry the band's load, especially now that they don't have to deal with intrusion of Fischer's indie-boy yelp. However, the band has also streamlined their songwriting, whittling away the unconventional turns and multiple pre-choruses that made their earlier material more interesting, leaving emotionally aerodynamic compositions free of atonal snags or polyrhythmic left-turns. Rainer Maria may still be writing love songs, but the relationships of Catastrophe Keeps Us Together appear thematically and musically less complicated and knotty.
Even with an occasionally dark-tinged lens, Catastrophe's hearts will go on in widescreen style. The title track turns a grim apocalyptic vision into a repopulation fantasy, De Marrais belting out, "At the end of the world, I'm gonna find you," in true end-credits fashion. Elsewhere, "Love is..."-like statements are dropped, instructions for relationship success are dispensed, and acoustic guitars are played crisply. Not every story has a happy ending, but songs like "Life of Leisure" and "Already Lost" don't have anywhere near the meltdown of a good old De Marrais/Fischer screaming match-- and the vocab-heavy narrations fall short of disguising their cloying, cliched sentiments.
Fischer's input throughout is restricted to his guitar, which continues Rainer Maria's trend of focusing mostly on echobox atmosphere rather than serrations. Problem is, the punchier parts still sound the best, the four-chord mantra of "Bottle" or the overdrive-drenched darting between the drums of "I'll Make You Mine" standing out relative to the spacier, flimsier tones of their reinterpretation of Bob Dylan's "I'll Keep It With Mine".
It's useless to keep wishing hard for the heady days of the mid-90s; like the rest of us, the members of Rainer Maria are different people than they were 10 years ago. But it's still discouraging to see a band that once painted such accurate sound pictures of the complexities of love go the primary-color route of the power-ballad, snipping off the loose ends and hangnails that formerly propelled their relationship updates. Like the anthemic stylings of Ms. Dion, Catastrophe's valentines are direct and glossy, but ultimately as hollow as a gift-shop bauble-- a brand unworthy of a tracksuit.
