If you get déjà vu during the cascading chords and four-on-the-floor simmer of "Hold Me in the River", the first track on Brakesbrakesbrakes (née Brakes) sophomore LP, it's probably because the Hold Steady opened Boys and Girls in America with a very similar progression. This isn't Brakes only resemblance to the critical darlings of nü-classic rock; they have roughly the same relationship to the Ramones that the Hold Steady has to the Boss, or, for that matter, Art Brut to the Fall. All these bands update their icons with an irreverent indie rock flavor, highly conceptual lyrics, and, in brakesbrakesbrakes' case, accents of Southern rock. On The Beatific Visions, they're also more like the Pixies than ever before, having made a more "serious" album than their debut, Give Blood, while retaining their off-kilter aura.
Give Blood was as fun as this superior effort, but also a little shtickier. Here, the shtick-- lively jangles infused with a punk leer and Eamon Hamilton's phlegm-laced rants-- has crystallized into a more realized, brighter gleam. Gone are the gimmicky fragments and Mcluskyesque scene-jabs. The Beatific Visions is dominated by direly catchy and fully fleshed-out songs that pop like punk, lilt like country, mutter politics, and reek of the garage: "Hold Me in the River" crashes along on an ornery, feel-good choogle; the twangy licks on "On Your Side" are so slippery that it sounds like guitarist Thomas White had chicken grease on his fingers. These are balanced out with tender ballads that don't sacrifice Brakesbrakesbrakes' dark, ridiculous wit, like the baggy trail-song "If I Should Die Tonight" ("tell her that I love her," Hamilton croons with fleeting sweetness, "or she might never know,"), the light-as-the-Shins ballad "Isabel", and standout track "No Return", a serene, blossoming hum that brings the album to an moving close.
We know that Hamilton is into literature from his Dostoevsky-rhapsodizing days in British Sea Power; here, there's a whiff of Bulgakov in "Margarita", and the specter of Barthelme looms with portentous absurdity above the whole affair. This is especially evident on "Porcupine or Pineapple": Hamilton hawks up the titular refrain like a loogie, then transforms the non-sequitur into a potent metaphor for intractability as the garage punk clatter starts to really stomp: "Who won the war/ Was it worth fighting for?" This is a wartime record with a heavy political dimension, but brakesbrakesbrakes prefer to couch their dissent in raucous tones of Pynchonian dread, seldom proselytizing: "It's clear it's the fear keeps us under control" Hamilton keens convincingly on "Margarita". And on Chubby Checker send-up "Spring Chicken", he jitters, "Come on over, do the terrorist/ It makes me so nervous when you're moving like this."
On this same song, Hamilton repeatedly invites us to do the "spring chicken"-- yep, it's a song-accompanied-by-a-dance, in the recent tradition of so many hopeful rap stars. Brakesbrakesbrakes also put their unique spin on another hypermodern trend, the mobile-communications-technology song (see also Da Musicianz's "Camera Phone" and James Figurine's "55566688833"). "Mobile communications let me down again," Hamilton sings to a bad connection on this melting slow-burner. Brakesbrakesbrakes straddle the silly-serious fault line without slipping; Hamilton's more refined vocal style-- rambunctious, squalling, charismatic and tuneful-- is a terrific conduit for such vibrantly contrasting content. If the pre-apocalyptic fear is omnipresent, so is the reckless abandon. The Beatific Visions is the shimmy at the end of the world, wide-eyed and wild as it should be.
