I'd say that melodrama does not fit the Standard well, but they've been building a career on a quiet tension between guitars, pianos, and Tim Putnam's terse yelping, never more successfully than on their 2004 album Wire Post to Wire. But for a band that trades in that kind of ambiguity with no easy emotional answers, their balancing act is on a much higher wire-- the more melodrama they mine from their unique brand of restraint, the further they get from any kind of release.
Albatross starts strong: "Red Drop" has a confident guitar strum and unpredictable breakdowns, and "Closed Drum" is a spirited Pinback nick with swinging acoustic arpeggios and simmering electric guitars creating white noise just below its surface. Unfortunately, the lengthy center of this record is a brick of brooding, mid-tempo dullness. The formula may not have changed much between records, but Albatross at its best suffers from an atmosphere so stale it chokes the songs, and at worse sounds like the soundtrack to Rain Man, given the booming percussion and hanging organ tones on songs like "Play the Part" and "Not Asleep".
The Standard never get cartoonishly morose, but their plundering of the same gray middle ground becomes exhausting from a lack dynamics or pacing. The moments of brightness are fleeting, like the notes of Jay Clarke's piano in "Not Asleep" that flutter above the ponderousness of the track like a feather on a gust of wind. Other breaths of fresh air come late in the record: The factory-line pounding of the penultimate track "In Waves" provides a much-needed shot in the arm, and the bubbling organ in the intro "Little Green" neatly incorporates post-rock sounds and textures, but it stumbles into a wall of guitars that's more like a knee-high ledge and a coda that strains to reach poignancy. "You Will" is less dynamic, but Putnam's calm monotone shows an ease and confidence that brings a sigh of relief, though no less weary than the rest of the album. You'd think that for keeping the mood so static and the focus so narrow, more of the songs on Albatross would hit their mark.
