Since they debuted with 2005's Jungles EP, Rahim have imbued the anxious sounds of 1990s D.C. post-punk with a twist of pop savvy. The New York-based quartet skipped over the scrappy, unpolished debut album that's so common to indie bands. They were together for a few years before they released Jungles, but judging solely by their discography, they seem to have emerged fully formed. This developmental glitch is apt for a band so obsessed with the vagaries of evolution.
Many bands spend their 20s exploring emotional states, placing themselves at the exact center of the universe. Rahim take a broader, more aloof view, regarding their lives as blips in a vast, chaotic system. Instead of friends, enemies, and lovers, they only see architecture rising and falling-- civilizations, too. It's not that the emotional is absent in Rahim's music, they simply don't give it much credence: "My friends are beautiful, but they all know/ That they're all accidents..." Evolutionary developments, not emotional ones, are the pendulum they use to mark time. "500,000 years on land/ 500,000 years and we grow back again."
Rahim's position is essentially amoral: If everything's an accident, no one's accountable. But their finesse with these weighty themes makes them more than nihilistic; they strive for meaning even as they reject it. The ceremonial "Vision" makes an oblique case for human continuity. A verse about atavistic rituals sets up a chorus that's worth quoting at length: "Each change in my world/ As the sea has changed before/ I remember every word in my simple way/ Frenzied as we were/ Did we see this view before?/ I remember without benefit of vision." Even if existence is an accident, we can still locate patterns, echoes, and connections. These moments, when Rahim discovers traces of value in the process of tearing it down, are redemptive.
Laughter's musical light-footedness also helps its ponderous themes go down easier. Singer Michael Friedrich's slightly nasal voice is a bit like Elvis Costello's, and he wraps it around surprisingly mobile melodies, making this the rare post-punk record that you can hum. The band's guitar parts are spiky and spangled, but avoid the genre-pitfall of rigidity; they actually swing a bit, in periodic surges and glides. Tactful horns, synth washes, and vibraphones ruffle the limber yet ironclad core instrumentation like faint updrafts. Instead of variations on clangor, we get genuine diversity: "The Same" drones majestically, "Tired Man" slouches with the aid of wheezy synths, and "Of Course" shaggily unfurls.
Rahim seem to take the same bird's-eye view of their albums as they do of history. They have perceived Laughter as whole and enlivened it, strategically, with inventive embellishments. Drummer Phil Sutton deserves a lot of the credit on this score-- he's great at dropping in a few agile clicks or subtle cowbells to unobtrusively color or complicate a rhythmic structure. One of the album's best moments comes on "Cities Change": on the last word of the verse, the whole band goes "woof" as the drum pattern retreats to the rim, making a pivot that slingshots us into the chorus. ("Woof" sounds silly on paper, but it really does sound awesome on the record.) It's kind of funny that, despite Laughter's evolutionary themes, its merits owe equally to its intelligent design.
