On Hells on Wheels' third album, The Odd Church, there's a moment when the verse of "Perversion" careers into the chorus like a rollercoaster hitting a freefall. The music sounds like it's being pulled along by gravity as much as by the musicians themselves, who might as well be screaming and waving their hands in the air as they take that plunge. It's a thrilling passage, and the fact that the next five songs contain similar moments robs it of exactly none of its power. Living up to the band's name, side one of The Odd Church is full of great blasts of manic guitar and manic-er melodies, played with breakneck abandon by a group with the unlikely talent for referencing a range of influences-- the Pixies, the Ramones, Phil Spector, even Belle & Sebastian here and there-- while sounding completely confident and vital. The Swedish trio sells their hooks by sheer force of will, ratcheting up the tempo and the drama as Rickard Lindgren and Åsa Sohlgren trade lines like Black Francis and Kim Deal playing Tracy and Hepburn.
After the feint of the subdued but sarcastic "Heard You on the Radio" and the self-propulsion of "Perversion" comes "Alexandr", about an admirably literate athlete; Lindgren laments "Most people of acquired taste have the anatomy of walking canes" like he's Stuart Murdoch-- with all the biting wit and brainy humor that comparison implies. He and Sohlgren nail the coda of the time-traveling "As We Play" as if they're all too aware of the folly of band life: "At least we didn't die away" sounds like a determined dream they've not yet realized.
With Lindgren's scribbling guitar and Johan Risberg's pummeling drums, "Come On" ends the first side with an indie grandeur that's a perfect climax to a this-close-to-perfect run of songs. If The Odd Church had ended here, or if it had continued on in that same vein, it would be easy to extol its virtues unguardedly. But this isn't an EP, it's an album, and an ambitious one at that. Starting with "At Least You Still Pretend You Care", Hell on Wheels take a different sort of precipitous drop-off, abandoning their concise structures and headlong rush for a plodding pace, vague synth atmospherics, and rangier, less urgent songs.
Well, maybe that's not exactly fair. The songs have their moments-- like the stuttering rhythms of the impressively obscure Yaz cover "Tuesday" or the disappointing realizations on "Handing Over the Heart" that love isn't really about "Tearing off the shirt/ Cutting up the chest"-- but they suffer their proximity to side one, which means it's impossible to hear them on their own merits. But that's praising with faint damnation. In truth, side two sounds fine, if less immediate, less tuneful, less frenzied. You wait for the crucial freefall, but get a bit of a letdown instead.
