The Long Winters frontman-cum-producer John Roderick may have spent formative years in Anchorage, Alaska but there’s nothing overtly chilly about the Seattle quartet’s third full-length, Putting the Days to Bed. Never mind that on “Hindsight” Roderick deliberates about holding a snowball of a girl and croons about “craving the sun” (all in that crazy awesome voice of his: part dude from Okkervil River, part Craig Finn), this stuff’s about as wintry as possible, arriving mid-summer as balmy noise for the heat-waved and bummed vacation-reeling. Since 2002’s The Worst You Can Do Is Harm, the Long Winters have made names for themselves as purveyors of hard-to-pigeonhole, mostly likeable-- if not staunchly consistent-- pop. The back-to-back bounciness(es) of “Fire Island, AK” and “Teaspoon” on *Putting the Days to Bed * are further proof of the band’s leanings toward not so much power pop or even necessarily powerful pop-- just powered up pop, all horns and echoes and toe-tapping parties.
But emotional pick-me-ups these aren’t, per se: With Roderick, everything’s about “me” and “you,” either angsty correspondence/confrontation or words to the wise. “(It’s a) Departure” finds him explaining, “I like the old days/ But not all the old days/ Only the good old days”: With Putting the Days to Bed, L-Dubs’ trademark aural cheeriness hasn’t vanished-- if anything, it’s even upped-- but Roderick’s songwriting, here, is at its best and maybe bleakest. Lyrically, the album concerns itself with let-downs and hard truths concerned with what suckers humans really are: sad affinities for self-destruction (on “Hindsight” he asks “Is this new move just to keep moving?” and bails water out of a pretty but dilapidated boat because he likes the shape of it) and insatiable idealism and whatever. On “Honest,” at the album’s center, a mother tells her daughter: “Honest, it’s all right to be a singer, but don’t you love a singer, whatever you do” followed by what sounds like a choir reiterating “whatever you do”, like an updated “Que Sera” for a would-be groupie. Lines off Putting the Days to Bed are mostly hit or miss (misses come across as standard, petty gripes) but at their finest, they’re beautiful: “Did you see me the way I imagined? Every eyelash a picket or a wire?”
The most anthemic and orchestral approach something only one stop shy of the grandiose gloom of "Do You Realize?" and the Long Winters are closer than they've ever been to perfectly executing the huge sounding sad song. Still, they miss the masterful mark: Maybe it’s that there are too many wannabe huge songs stuck side-by-side, maybe they’re dwarfed in the process, maybe those kamikaze echoes wind up more grating than agreeable. Regardless, Putting the Days to Bed is a solid effort-- a step in a promising new direction.
