Brooklyn indie-rockers Grooms announced the release of their previous album, 2013’s Infinity Caller, by admitting they nearly broke up twice while making it. Things did not get any easier for them in the interim. After skipping out on Infinity Caller’s tours due to day-job commitments, bassist Emily Ambruso—whose history with band co-founder Travis Johnson dates back to their pre-Grooms outfit, the Muggabears—decided she could no longer afford to be in the band. That said, no amount of financial security could’ve inured Grooms to the subsequent blow of losing their longtime studio space, Death by Audio, last fall to the office complex that ate Williamsburg. All this would seemingly make Grooms the ideal sad-sack subjects for some "60 Minutes" segment on the depressing economic reality of the aspiring modern American indie-rock band. But don’t feel too sorry for Grooms—on their fourth and most illuminating album to date, the band don’t sound defeated so much as defiantly liberated.
The trajectory of Travis Johnson’s creative evolution mirrors that of indie rock itself. Where the Muggabears conjured a distinctly early-'90s discord, and the first few Grooms albums hewed toward the more refined melodicism of post-Pavement college rock, with Comb the Feelings Through Your Hair, Johnson and company have reached the same career crossroads that forbears like the Flaming Lips and Radiohead hit at the turn of the millennium. And while they haven’t gone so far as to embrace the orchestral pomp of the former or the abstract electronic experimentation of the latter, Comb the Feelings Through Your Hair—the last album to be recorded at Death by Audio prior to its closure last November—bears the telltale signs of an indie rock band who’ve become bored with being just another indie rock band: Guitars take a back seat to synth-powered rhythmic propulsion; traditional song forms get broken down into open-ended arrangements; Can records get dusted off for spiritual guidance.
But while Johnson’s standing as the last remaining original Grooms member would presumably make him the band’s de facto musical leader, Comb the Feelings fully harnesses the collaborative potential of the lineup he assembled for Infinity Caller’s tours. Throughout the record, bassist Jay Heiselmann and drummer-cum-"Better Call Saul" star Steve Levine (this album’s MVP) establish a restless rhythmic undertow that stews beneath the songs’ deceptively placid surfaces. At its most potent—like on the title track, or the Lonerism-scaled "Will the Boys"—the tension between Johnson’s clear-headed, plainspoken delivery and the band’s equilibrium-upsetting textural overload conjures that sensation of trying to keep your cool in mixed company while feeling like a heart-palpating, panic-attacked mess on the inside.
In terms of sound and vision, Comb the Feelings constitutes a massive upgrade from Grooms’ hazy, hermetically sealed previous releases, trading in underdog scrappiness for boldness and bravado. It’s the sort of album where every song ends up in a much different place than where it started and, in the case of the roiling opener "Bed Version", sometimes the big instrumental hook isn’t revealed until the outro. But Grooms are still getting a feel for the new sonic environments they’ve opened for themselves, and still figuring out how their linear melodies fit into more amorphous surroundings, resulting in some abrupt structural shifts that leave the seams showing. Perhaps sensing that the krautrockin’ rave-up "Doctor M" is precisely the sort of predictable move indie rock bands resort to when they’re trying to be unpredictable, Grooms derail its motorik momentum into an extended ambient symphony that, for added enigmatic effect, dissolves into indecipherable party chatter. The following "Half Cloud", meanwhile, begins as a Red House Painters-style reverie before a martial drumbeat clears the way for a feedback-sculpted passage that cuts out just as the song seems to be venturing into uncharted territory, like a hastily scrapped rough sketch for some unrealized master plan. But that sort of impulsiveness is the natural byproduct of an album from a long-suffering band audibly brimming with a renewed sense of purpose. If not all its experiments yield consistently entrancing results, Comb the Feelings is the sound of Grooms basking in the first radiant glimpse of a future that, not too long ago, it didn’t think it’d live long enough to see.
