Snowglobe was at one point a normal, cohesive rock band. But it seems that on Oxytocin, the band's third album, it's become more of a collective helmed by Brad Postlethwaite-- there's a message in the artwork claiming that this is the first in a series on "solo-directed projects by the members of Snowglobe." The sound is still huge, layered like a Bryce Canyon cliff face. It's the kind of music that strokes the nerve that makes critics and P.R. people compare anything with a musical saw to Neutral Milk Hotel, and the comparison holds to a point. The instruments are densely piled on-- and yes, there is a saw-- but Postlethwaite's songwriting aims for something less impressionistic. There's more of a sense of communal music-making, rather than a feeling of being trapped in someone's free-associating head.
Big vocal harmonies figure prominently across the album, and I mean big. Postlethwaite and a couple of backup singers layer their voices into freakily homogenous choirs. It plays well into the overall aesthetic, and the melody is never lost in the complex arrangements and exceedingly dry production. The best vocal arrangement comes on "December Ghost", a pensive song built on a series of patterns that jump from one instrument to another, beginning on acoustic guitar and ending on the violin. The harmonies waft in and out, and at times the backing voices separate from one another to sing brief melodic phrases.
"At Times a Nightmare" is a slow, country-inflected song that suddenly lurches skyward after three minutes into a second movement-- it's far too substantial to think of as a coda-- and after the vocal portion there's a minute of flat-out wailing on analog synthesizers. It's the most cathartic song on an otherwise even-keeled album, and the lyric "Never wanted this to end/ Sunday morning it was back to the mourning/ It was back into the pain again" is among Postlethwaite's best.
Little instrumental interludes are sprinkled across the album, and rather surprisingly, they offer some of the most appealing moments. "Intro to Dry", um, introduces "Dry" with a bit of broken-backed trumpet, "Cellos" is a dramatic, charging instrumental that builds from a quiet cello ostinato to a roaring pile of instrumentals and then breaks back down to just a bass line in less than two minutes, and "Piano" is a brief stab of melancholy before the floating "Caroline", which is like the Radar Brothers with less stationary inertia.
Oxytocin is full of little surprises and details that reward repeat listens, but very few of the decorations seem merely tacked on. As full as it is, there are certain moments on the album where it oddly lacks atmosphere, perhaps a side effect of the saturated production. That's a small complaint, though, and Oxytocin is a resounding success that makes me wonder what else is on tap in this solo-directed Snowglobe series.
