What a time our nation's capital was having around the turn of the century. You could count on two hands the number of people actually affected by our president's latest dick move. Newt Gingrich had left both his posts, and for an all-too-brief while, things were quiet on the batshit front. The District's favorite sons, Fugazi had settled into a nice little rut before their as-yet-unbroken hiatus, and as the last decade has taught us, a world with Fugazi is preferable to one without.
It's easy to romanticize turn of the century D.C. as a creative hotbed, especially with the records to prove it; the DeSoto and Dischord catalogs are testament to the wellspring beneath the swamp city as we entered the second Bush administration. Certainly So Many Dynamos are as guilty of it as any, as they've built a career around the breathless hooks, hyperkinetic song structure, splattery disco-funk drums, and emo confessionalism of the city's now-decade-old renaissance. Never mind that they're Midwestern boys who didn't get around to dropping their first full length until well after the 'Plan dismembered; as a downstate Illinoisian with precisely zero Burning Airlines tickets stubs in my collection, I, too, think fondly of a scene of which I wasn't anywhere close to a member. In most ways, it's great to have a 2009 record that'd keep the awkward button-up-and-Converse dance party of No Kill No Beep Beep going strong; even now, 1999-era D.C. is certainly fresher ground than, say, two years later in New York. But it's hard not to think of So Many Dynamos as much more than a throwback act, particularly without the songs some of their time-travel contemporaries managed to eek out.
Any D.C. band worth its loft space had to have a rhythm section as locked-in as the Republican-controlled Congress, and in synth-bassist/vocalist Aaron Stovall and drummer Clayton Kunstel, the Dynamos certainly have that. It's the first thing you'll notice on opener "Artifacts of Sound" and, well, much of the rest of The Loud Wars; Stovall and Kunstel just dig in, with Stovall's forcible fingerwork and Kunstel's from-all-directions drumming lay the groundwork for virtually off of the Wars. This rock-solid foundation allows for embellishment wherever there's a spare inch, and the Dynamos dress up Loud Wars in whirring trebly synths and, yes, "angular" guitar stabs and as many of Stovall's words that will fit in the space.
So, yeah, if you'd walked into Melody Records circa summer 1999 and heard The Loud Wars, you wouldn't have batted an eye. And that's just it; The Loud Wars is formula, and it's not even really the Dynamos' formula to use, so when the songs fall a bit flat, it's hard to know whom to point the finger at. The Loud Wars runs on amicably enough-- helped by its ripchord pace from front-to-back, yet another D.C. trademark that marked the least essential-in-hindsight of those records-- and you'd be hard up to finger a bad tune here, but it's all about the same: the same reference points, the same too-busy-by-half arrangements, the same emphasis on proficiency over depth, the same defensively bummed out lyrics, the same slightly sour melodies, the same sense that you're dancing through some kind of dread that's hard to place a finger on. It also doesn't help that this is certainly the Dynamos' least engaging record sonically-- everything feels squashed, the same color of burnt umber, a hue courtesy of traditionally more technicolor producer Chris Walla of Death Cab for Cutie-- or that Stovall's voice seems to be veering a little farther from Travis Morrison (which is good!) and a little closer to that dude from Cake. That is less good.
When I take The Loud Wars as a justifiably forgotten but enjoyable enough record from a bygone era, I'm soothed; it's a little better than, oh, Fake French or something, and I'm sure as hell not going to dig around to find that one with this thing floating around. But it's 2009, and as you're well aware, D.C.'s turned over a couple times now, which makes what So Many Dynamos are doing roughly as fresh as a Linda Tripp joke. One can't help but wonder what the Dynamos might find if they fixed their gaze a ways past Fort Reno; go-go, perhaps?
