I've been hearing a lot about how downloading (legal and otherwise) is going to hasten the death of the album. I don't buy it. I think what's really happening is that the two media, short and long formats, have reached something of an equilibrium point where certain music is best presented in an album context, while singles are better for others. Which is entirely logical.
Even in spite of their prodigious pop songwriting chops, Apollo Sunshine fall more into the album camp, as their approach to melodious rock 'n' roll is gleefully chaotic, full of too many influences to properly enumerate them and inclined to stretch the conventions of media like so much sweet taffy. When I say they swing on a dime from charging rock to hushed balladry to back porch jams to plaintive country, I mean it. These songs don't seem to mind completely reinventing themselves halfway through, interrupting what you thought was a quiet, emotional song about feeling displaced in the world with a dive-bombing instrumental passage that flits between new wave and bottom-heavy groove. This is what happens on opener "Flip!", where the narrator implores the stars for advice and they tell him to "keep breathing."
Apollo Sunshine's worldview, as their name suggests, is generally bright and hopefult, though it's tinged with enough uncertainty to provide tension. All four members sing (they've gained one member since their debut, 2003's wildly inventive Katonah), often harmonizing when you'd least expect it, such as singing stacked "woo-oohs" in the midst of a raging guitar squall on "Phyllis". Song titles make an interesting word-association string: "Magnolia", "Phyllis", "God", "Lord", and "Bed". The music sounds free-associative, too, and there's little consideration given to restraint. They're inspired to yell on the wailing Southern rock stomper "Lord", and so they do, with wild abandon, Sam Cohen and Jesse Galalgher shredding vocal chords over the muscular rhythms of new recruit Sean Aylward and drummer Jeremy Black.
When I lived in the band's home base of Boston, Black and Cohen played together in a band called Ca$h. Ca$h were a good band, with some excellent songs ("Smash Your Radio" even got some ironic airplay), but it was identifiably pop-punk; it had a genre. Even then, there were hints of the complex song structure they're into now with Apollo Sunshine, but this new band has no real genre outside of made-up, adjective-loaded hybrids like "manic, free-associative pop" or something like that. There are great stand-alone songs here, like the 1960s-at-78-rpm sugar rush of "Eyes", but Apollo Sunshine is best listened to in a full dose and appreciated in all its messy glory.
