Renee LoBue's got one of those voices that can pretty much accommodate any mood or mode. On Elk City's fourth LP, House of Tongues, she projects Debbie Harry's sultry cool one minute, 70s easy-listening mellow the next, and a track later, the chutzpah of an alt-rock diva. LoBue's bandmates, including former Luna guitarist Sean Eden, share her keenness for rock history, as well as enviable chops and range. And when offered the opportunity to prove it-- to bust out guitar solos, frilly piano runs, busy drum patterns, even the occasional glockenspiel-- they rarely demur.
Technical skill and versatility can be huge assets, obviously. But they can also be liabilities when a band's artistic vision reads closer to "cataract" than 20/20. Over their decade-plus run, Elk City have laced their otherwise unremarkable pop-rock oeuvre with folk, jazz, soul, blues, country, cabaret, and whatever else they happened to be listening to at the time. It's actually easier to say what the New York band isn't trying to do or reference-- say, hip-hop or anything particularly 2010-sounding (not even in the song titled "2010")-- than what they are. So Tongues is swollen with disparate sounds packed tight and awkward as a large extended family vacationing in a tiny beach cottage. Without air conditioning.
The fact that they're game for almost anything makes for some WTF juxtapositions-- for example, when the guitar heroics mucking up the middle of art-rock hodge-podge "Wire Goats" are interrupted by a bongo drum solo. Or when the band tacks several instrumental false endings to "The Onion"'s grim organ-drone millieu. "For the Uninitiated" is such a compost heap it's hard to isolate any single offense, though I suspect the problem is that band members are all playing different songs.
Wild eclecticism doesn't necessarily equal bad record, as Janelle Monáe most recently argued with her taxonomy breaching and brilliant The ArchAndroid. But to make a record that won't wear out its welcome by the end of track one takes a certain amount of taste and self-restraint. Not surprisingly, Tongue's more effective tracks, such as "Real Low Riders", are its relatively discerning ones. Propelled by a powerful little drum riff and a catchy pop melody that LoBue interprets with mournful understatement, "Nine O'Clock in France" is the best song here-- even if the progressive instrumental pileup makes its ending less satisfying than its beginning. But I guess we were warned: True to its title, House of Tongues is a tower of Babel.
