Love as Laughter have never been tough to root for. Since founder and songwriting engine-- as well as former Lync frontman and longtime Isaac Brock bff-- Sam Jayne started the project as a platform for hissy four track meanderings in the mid-1990s, LAL have taken an increasingly populist bent to squeezing out their Stones-y indie rock. 2001's From Sea to Shining Sea and 2005's Laughter's Fifth arrived quietly and to less commercial ovation than you would think given the way they seemed to brush aside bands of their ilk. There were skyscraper hooks, whimsical lyrics, and, perhaps most importantly, there was nary a trace of pretense. At high volumes or low, Sam Jayne just seemed like he could give a fuck.
It's a charm, of course, that has benefitted Jayne's fly-unzipped songwriting greatly in the past. But Holy, his major label debut and first for Brock's Glacial Pace imprint (Brock also appears here, providing guitar licks in "Paul Revere" and "All Parts Of Me"), is more a collection of scattered mood pieces than the big league unveiling it could have been. Produced by Joe Blaney, whose CV includes work with the Clash, the Ramones, and Tom Waits, Holy does enjoy an expected sheen that previous work didn't. Still, the end result feels flat and a little phoned-in, this despite Jayne's gradual and often fruitful progression towards breezy, back porch fare.
Undeniably top-heavy, Holy is an album whose more winning strummers and stormers are conveniently located in its first half. Title track and opener "Holy" is a slow-roasted acoustic number, with Jayne setting the tone via falsetto: "Holy is never out of reach, I heard that demons don't hit the beach." While muted, it still shares the oddly hypnotic effects of its predecessor on the 2005 LP Laughter's Fifth's. There, opening track "In Amber" was a tone poem that tapped Keith Richards vein with great success. "Holy" does well by forming a Stones-saluting diptych with the subsequent "Baby Shambles", bouncing its guitar strokes into a latticework of carnival ba-ba-ba-ba-da-da's as the Dionysian thrust of its counterpart goes down just as smoothly.
Early highlights aside (particularly the bone-rattling "Paul Revere"), much of the album could be written off as cruise-controlled and that feel definitely resonates. Jayne is wise to feature guitar tones that soften and grow more sumptuous with each listen, if only because it accents nicely the languid, almost lazy feel of the record as whole. Nothing feels forced. Even the glassy-and ill-advised tropical pop of "All Parts Of Me", which sounds more like a recent Modest Mouse outtake, brandishes an unusual sense of contentment. Few of the melodies feel inspired, but within the dusty halfway point, "Konny And Jim" resides the sound of a songwriter totally cool with that. He'll turn it up and on when he feels like it.
