Socialize opens with its title track: a dusty drum-machine lope, skeletal acoustic guitar and bass slowly weaving in and out of each other, no vocals for the first half of the song. When the vocals do come in, Anar Badalov and Flora Wolpert Checknoff, the two teenagers who play just about everything on the album, just mumble in tandem like a gloomy Moldy Peaches, moving glacially toward a melody but stopping abruptly before they get there. It's a trick they pull repeatedly. Badalov and Wolpert Checknoff have this shit down perfectly, but it's all they do. So while Socialize is an impressive work, it's depressive, monolithic mood can be just about unbearable over the course of its 11 songs.
This might all just be a long way of saying that Metal Hearts sound pretty much exactly like Arab Strap. Badalov's voice in particular is just Aidan Moffat's smoky mutter without the Glasgow burr, and both bands have the same proclivities toward diffuse, muddy compositions and lyrical explorations of bad-faith Neil LaBute relationship politics. "You watch me fester in masturbatory quiet/ I swallow a bottle of wine so I can get by it," Wolpert Checknoff gurgle on "Mountain Song". For a couple of kids who started their band via IM, these two couldn't sound much more sad or tired.
All this foggy, understated self-loathing can be a bit much-- especially when the music comes in barely-there wisps of guitar-- but Socialize is lifted by a series of unexpected, intriguing touches. "Gentleman's Spell" features a violin that sounds like a film-noir saxophone, and when it combines with the song's murky breakbeat, it's as if the the ghost of Jay Dee come to haunt the world of mopey indie-folk. "Mountain Song" takes a bunch of New Order drums sounds but rearranges them to make them sound queasy and disconnected rather than bright and euphoric. And on "Ocean Song" florid guitar riffs swim into complicated patterns and form a lush pillow for the empty-shell laments of the lyrics.
It'll be a while before Badalov and Wolpert Checknoff manage to turn all this dejection into anything transcendent, but they're both young, and they've got plenty of time. If nobody introduces them to puppies or Pixie Stix or Playstation in the next couple of years, they could reach Cat Power levels of cathartic misery before anyone realizes what happened.
