The title of the Citizens' second album rather nicely captures 10,000-ish years of human history. Seriously, no one really knows where this is all going. We're just riding history wherever it may take us, be it to glory, ruin, or some boring place in between. The newspaper-hatted chimp in the cover painting captures drift perfectly-- his expression is so ambiguous that you can read anything you want into it. Perhaps he's realizing he forgot to evolve.
The band behind the album cover-- now a quintet-- has evolved somewhat in the past two years. Though the basic sound of the Citizens is still the same, they exert more control over it this time out, locating a balance between the grit and sophistication their earlier material veered back and forth between.
Mark Lesseraux's songwriting is odd-- free-associative in a way that still implies a story, but always full of vivid imagery. His powerful delivery is a big part of making it work-- when he sings, "We stopped for pancakes/ With buffalo wings on the side" on "Apache Strobe Light", he sells it as something more profound than an incongruous meal. Likewise on "The Creator", which opens with the unforgettable couplet, "I guess it must be true, I saw it in the newspaper/ The karate instructor weighed well over 300 pounds." The song has a new wave bounce, but it's not really new wave-- the synths swirling through the beat have more of a science experiment vibe to them than a spiky call to dance.
"Interstate Prayer" is one of the band's best songs yet, a song about a kid who goes road-tripping alone to follow in the footsteps of his heroes, principally Jack Kerouac. The lines "He read about it in books/ His friends and family giving him looks/ When you're a rebel/ They do that," encapsulate the naïvete of the character's quest for identity through travel over a burbling bassline, thoughtful drums and floating guitar. Opener "The Surfer" is a mini-suite that begins as a clear, aquatic pop song with a crystalline chorus and then simmers down for a slow, plodding build-up to a crunching finale.
The band's ragged edges come out in the clanging guitars of "In Your Stars", which would make a great finale for the record. Instead, the band ends with a fine but inessential cover of Gary Numan's "I Dream of Wires". Still, to say that the band's originals are better than their covers is no great insult, and it's hard to find genuine false notes on Post Cro-Magnon Drift. The Citizens are still a young band with some evolving left to do, but it sounds like they're on the cusp of something great.
