Fresh off the Polyvinyl boat, Saturday Looks Good to Me release Fill Up the Room, their seventh full-length album and first on K Records. Finally the array of comparisons critics have made regarding this band is to be found in its entirety on the same release. The moody crescendos and meanderings of Fred Thomas' voice cut slices of Stephin Merritt; the shimmying guitars on "Money in the Afterlife" suggest the dance-rock quirks and pop romances of Vampire Weekend, BOAT, and the Brunettes. These great discrepancies of mood and genre slant are welcome as standalone pieces and contributions to the band's already hodgepodge oeuvre. So as a collection, the album is fitful and pleasantly disconcerting, a far cry even from July's Cold Colors EP, which was a wintry aperitif to this full-length's sweet, sultry, and dimly sentimental refreshments.
Gone is the muddled production of SLGTM's accomplished singles collection Sound on Sound: here are close-set guitars, warm and furry vocals, and best of all, fully intelligible, wise and realistically poignant lyrics. "When I Lose My Eyes", with an accomplished melody of flits of speedy, echoic guitar, warm washes of sustains, and rhythmic twists, paints an actual scenario-- grounded, concrete, and heavy-- after a long instrumental intro. Thomas sings wistfully, "Me and my best friend/ Sleep without any clothes/ With books on the bedspread/ In languages no one knows/ All the windows are open/ All of the low lights glow/ And we flood all the rooms of our homes/ 'til we float/ And wash out to the street down below." The heady mix of plugging guitars in the left channel and powerful drums in the right soon gives way to a lighter two-step rhythm, string quartet, and more than a little hint of SLGTM's sometime collaborator Ted Leo, whose sheer single-handed guitar power is aptly appropriated here. The vocal-free exit, rife with thumping drum rushes and strummed monotony, pulls the song to a weighty vocal climax of soaring whines-- so the song is worth a whole paragraph.
The rest of the album owes a lot to opener "Apple", which borrows more from the band's earliest influences, particularly the carefree narratives and expressive vocals of 1960s rock, which are here turned into a boldly romantic vocal swoon: "I could fill up the room/ With these things/ I've been thinking about you." It forces optimism about the rest of the album and recalls the sensitive, enveloping atmosphere of Menomena's latest, which took us on a retreat where rock songs could be bold and heartfelt missives. Later, indebtedness to Stuart Murdoch may nauseate some listeners on "Peg", but when paired with any other track on the album, Thomas' voice is easily understood as more expressive than one track allows-- each song gives a glimmer of the inflections he will give it elsewhere, as with the whiny, brassy yelps of the simple guitar-pop song "Money in the Afterlife".
Some of the songs stutter and stumble, though they're actually the opposite, rhythmically speaking: The clap-happy "Edison Girls" is precise and danceable, but it drawls too heavily in Southern reflections by the electric guitar and Thomas' rhyming adorability is overdone. Betty Marie Barnes' one vocal contribution to this album is the disappointing "Hands in the Snow", a light, fluffy, precisely metered B&S tribute. Enveloping the handful of dull middle songs on the album is aching opener "Apple" and exit track "Whitey Hands", which experiments with a kind of homemade dulcimer, more organic hand claps, and Thomas' voice, which swoops and soars around a beautifully understated rhythm. It's yet more confirmation of this band's overstuffed toolbox-- confused, perhaps, but ultimately rewarding.
