Before its vintage bass line arrives, the first we hear of "Pebbles", a mid-album highlight on Strange Hearts, is crickets chirping. They seem to stay for the entirety of the song. That's a testament to this North Dakota outfit's fondness for atmosphere, something they've managed to spread out evenly across all 11 of these 1960s-indebted harmonizers. "Pebbles", as if by design, sounds like it was recorded for transistor radio play. The bass is dewey. The harmonies are starlit. The theremin is ripe. And then there's the matter of MJ Parker's opening line: "Pebbles, it's time to go home now/ The drag race is over/ You smashed up your car, and now our dream is over." It's all draped in a nice, light fuzz.
But as Real Estate, for example, use pools of reverb to give their songs their own sort of submerged ambiance, Secret Cities line their more contemporary sensibilities with a layer of fuzz for similar reasons. In this case, it's not at all about obfuscation and more in the service of added warmth. Some of that can be attributed to their decision to record Strange Hearts in the basement of a recently abandoned bank in Kansas City, but most of it's in the citrus-splashed feel of their songwriting. Opener "Always Friends" kicks things off with a light-footed guitar melody that-- just after they lace their second verse with some well-managed whistling-- gains strength as it goes. At the moment, Secret Cities find themselves in a lane with the Morning Benders and Grizzly Bear, the latter a band whose music, in juxtaposition, has a big brother-like energy to it.
That's because in contrast, these three seem to have taken a less agressively tailored approach to tapping similar veins of the 60s. As they are on "Pebbles" or the shuffle of "Love Crime", Secret Cities live and die by period-specific vocal harmonies, as mastered early on by the Zombies and Shangri-La's, just to name a couple. But Parker and fellow vocalist Charlie Gokey, both with well-suited cords for this kind of stuff, enjoy a great deal of verve in the manic rhythms of Alex Abnos. The racket they're able to muster together in the process is enough to set them apart from the pack. A song like "Ice Cream Scene" takes a few hairpin turns before settling into a two-minute breakdown outro that's assertive and rambunctious enough to belie their twee-est of tendencies. Elsewhere, "Brief Encounter" metes out psychedelic fare that's equally muscular. Organs bounce. Voice entwines. Horns march in. It could signal a parade just as easily as a funeral. Lively atmosphere either way.
